Chapter 5 - Weekly Questions
Weekly Questions


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

Information architecture identifies where and how important information such as customer records is maintained and secured. However, Infrastructure architecture includes the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment that when combined provides that underlying foundation to support the organisations goals. 

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.

One way to minimise the damage of a system crash is to have a backup and recovery strategy in place. A backup is an exact copy of a system's information and  recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash. 

3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 

• Flexibility - organisations must watch the business environment continuously to ensure that the system is flexible enough to meet all types of business changes.  
• Scalability - how well a system can adapt to increased demands
• Reliability - ensures all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information.
• Availability - addresses when systems can be accessed by users 
• Performance - measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction. 

4. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a business driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. SOA with its loosely coupled nature, allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion. 

5. What is an event? 

An occurrence or happening of significance to a task or program, such as the completion of an asynchronous input/output operation. A task may wait for an event or any of a set of events or it may (request to) receive asynchronous notification that the event has occurred. 

6. What is a service?

An SOA service is simply a business task, such as checking a potential customer's credit rating when opening a new account

7. What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

• Virtualisation benefits - They can reduce application tests and development time from days or weeks to a matter of hours by enabling users to test and qualify software in isolation, variety of security benefits (stemming from centralised computing environments), improved service level management , the ability to more easily run legacy systems, greater flexibility in locating staff and reducing software costs. 
• Grid computing benefits - improving productivity and collaboration of virtual organisations and respective computing and data resources, allowing widely dispersed departments and businesses to create virtual organisations to share data and resources, building robust and infinitely flexible and resilient operational architectures, providing access to massive computing and data resources and finally leveraging existing capital investments, which in turn help to ensure optimal utilisation and costs of computing capabilities.