Enterprise Architectures

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES

Weekly Questions – Week Six

This video is a short explanation of Enterprise Architectures.

What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

In formation architecture identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured, whereas information infrastructure includes the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation’s goals. They are both key components of an enterprise architecture, but their primary aspects differ.

 Three key areas of information architecture are backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and information security.

Five chief characteristics of a solid information infrastructure are flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability and performance.

A diagram of an Information Architecture.

Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.

An organisation can successfully implement a solid information architecture by creating and sustaining the three chief components of the architecture. The CIO (Chief Information Officers) must be able to instigate very strong back up, disaster recovery and security of the organisation’s information in order to save time and money, which is evidently lost due to system failures and crashes. An organisation should choose and enforce a back-up and recovery system that is in line with it’s business goals, as those with large volumes of information will require more frequent backups to storage servers in comparison to organisations with a smaller volume of information. An organisation must also consider the cost of losing information within each department, as well as across the whole enterprise, which will help the company to create a sufficient disaster recovery plan in a time where the organisation faces power outages, floods, and harmful hacking. Finally, security is a top priority for business managers, as they prevent hackers, spammers, and malcontents from entering their networks.

List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

As mentioned earlier, the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture are:

· Flexibiltiy – systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes, and this is achieved by the organisation’s awareness of today’s business as well as tomorrow’s.

· Scalability – this refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands including more customers and product lines and expansion into new markets.

· Reliability – this ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Unreliable information puts the company at risk when making decisions based on the information.

· Availability – this addresses when users can access systems. High availability refers a system component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. Systems must also come down for maintenance, upgrades and fixes, and scheduling system downtime for this is difficult when the system is expected to operate continually.

· Performance –how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction, and not having enough performance capacity can have a devastating and negative impact on a business.

Describe the business value in deploying a service-orientated architecture.

A service-orientated architecture is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. This helps businesses by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing ones, which evidently enables businesses to address the news business requirements, provides the option to make the services consumable across different channels, and and exposes the existing enterprise and legacy applications as services. The key technical concepts of SOA are:

· Services – a business task.

· Interoperability – the capability of two or more computer systems to share data and resources, even though different manufacturers make them.

· Loose coupling – the capability of services to be joined together on demand to create composite services, or disassembled just as easily into their functional components.

This link is a further explanation of a service-oriented architecture...


What is an event?

Events are the eyes and ears of the business expressed in technology – they detect threats and opportunities and alert those who can act on the information. It involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter – a low stock alert in the warehouse or an especially large charge on a customers credit card – and automatically alert the people best equipped o handle the issue.

What is a service?

Services are more like software products than they are coding projects, appealing to a broad audience and are reusable in order to have an impact on productivity. These services describe a valuable business process and include “Print”, “Save”, “Credit Check”, “Customer Information” and “Process Payment”.

When referring to Service Orientated Architecture, a service is simply a business task such as checking a potential customer’s credit rating when opening a new account. They are what a company does on a day-to-day basis, which are repeatable business tasks or components.