Chapter 5 IT infrastructure full notes

Defining IT infrastructure

An IT infrastructure consists of a set of physical devices and software applications that are required to operate the entire enterprise. But an IT infrastructure is also a set of firm-wide services budgeted by management and comprising both human and technical capabilities. these services include the following: - computing platforms used to provide computing services that connect employees, customers, and suppliers into a coherent digital environment. including large mainframes, midrange computers, desktop and laptop computers, and mobile handheld and remote cloud computing services - telecommunications services that provide data, voice, and video connectivity to employees, customers, and suppliers - data management services that store and manage corporate data and provide capabilities for analysing the data

what is IT infrastructure and what are the stages and drivers of IT infrastructure evolution?

An IT infrastructure includes investment in hardware, software, and services - such as consulting, education, and training - that are shared across the entire firm or across entire business units in the firm. A firm's IT infrastructure provides the foundation for serving customers, working with vendors, and managing internal firm business processes. Supplying firms worldwide with IT infrastructure (hardware and software) in 2014 is estimated to be a $3.8 trillion industry when telecommunications, networking equipment, and telecommunications services (Internet, telephone, and data transmission) are included. This does not include IT and related business process consulting services, which add another $400 billion. Investments in infrastructure account for between 25 and 50 percent of information technology expenditures in large firms, led by financial services firms where IT investment is well over half of all capital investment.

5. consultants and systems integration (chapter 3)

- IBM - HP - Accenture Even a large firm does not have the staff, the skills, the budget, or the necessary experience to deploy and maintain its entire IT infrastructure. Implementing a new infrastructure requires significant changes in business processes and procedures, training and education, and software integration Leading consulting firms providing this expertise include Accenture, IBM Global Services, HP, Infosys, and Wipro Technologies Software integration means ensuring the new infrastructure works with the firm's older, so-called legacy systems and ensuring the new elements of the infrastructure work with one another. Legacy systems are generally older transaction processing systems created for mainframe computers that continue to be used to avoid the high cost of replacing or redesigning them. Replacing these systems is cost prohibitive and generally not necessary if these older systems can be integrated into a contemporary infrastructure.

what are the current trends in computer hardware platforms? The exploding power of computer hardware and networking technology has dramatically changed how businesses organise their computing power, putting more of this power on networks and mobile handheld devices.

7 hardware trends: 1. the mobile digital platform 2. consumerisation of IT 3. quantum computing 4. virtualisation 5. cloud computing 6. green computing 7. high-performance/power-saving processors

(still under challenges of managing IT infrastructure and management solutions?) Management and Governance

A long-standing issue among information system managers and CEOs has been the question of who will control and manage the firm's IT infrastructure. Chapter 2 introduced the concept of IT governance and described some issues it addresses. Other important questions about IT governance are: Should departments and divisions have the responsibility of making their own information technology decisions or should IT infrastructure be centrally controlled and managed? What is the relationship between central information systems management and business unit information systems management? How will infrastructure costs be allocated among business units? Each organisation will need to arrive at answers based on its own needs.

a cloud can be public or private

A public cloud is owned and maintained by a cloud service provider, such as Amazon Web Services, and made available to the general public or industry group. A private cloud is operated solely for an organisation. It may be managed by the organisation or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. Like public clouds, private clouds are able to allocate storage, computing power, or other resources seamlessly to provide computing resources on an as-needed basis. Companies that want flexible IT resources and a cloud service model while retaining control over their own IT infrastructure are gravitating toward these private clouds.

what are the challenges of managing IT infrastructure and management solutions? Creating and managing a coherent IT infrastructure raises multiple challenges: dealing with platform and technology change (including cloud and mobile computing), management and governance, and making wise infrastructure investments

Dealing with platform and infrastructure change: As firms grow, they often quickly outgrow their infrastructure. As firms shrink, they can get stuck with excessive infrastructure purchased in better times. How can a firm remain flexible when most of the investments in IT infrastructure are fixed-cost purchases and licenses? How well does the infrastructure scale? Scalability refers to the ability of a computer, product, or system to expand to serve a large number of users without breaking down. New applications, mergers and acquisitions, and changes in business volume all impact computer workload and must be considered when planning hardware capacity. Firms using mobile computing and cloud computing platforms will require new policies and procedures for managing these platforms. They will need to inventory all of their mobile devices in business use and develop policies and tools for tracking, updating, and securing them and for controlling the data and applications that run on them. Firms using cloud computing and SaaS will need to fashion new contractual arrangements with remote vendors to make sure that the hardware and software for critical applications are always available when needed and that they meet corporate standards for information security. It is up to business management to determine acceptable levels of computer response time and availability for the firm's mission-critical systems to maintain the level of business performance they expect.

6. data mgmt and storage (see chapter 6)

Enterprise database management software is responsible for organising and managing the firm's data so that they can be efficiently accessed and used. Digital information is doubling every two years and the market for digital data storage devices has been growing at more than 15 percent annually over the last five years. In addition to traditional disk arrays and tape libraries, large firms are turning to network-based storage technologies. Storage area networks (SANs) connect multiple storage devices on a separate high-speed network dedicated to storage. The SAN creates a large central pool of storage that can be rapidly accessed and shared by multiple servers.

1. COMPUTER HARDWARE PLATFORMS

Firms worldwide are expected to spend $669 billion on computer hardware devices in 2014, including mainframes, servers, PCs, tablets, and smartphones The computer platform has changed dramatically in the last decade, with the introduction of mobile computing devices, from the ipod in 2001, to the iphone in 2007, and the ipad in 2010.

Evolution of IT infrastructure

General-purpose mainframe and minicomputer era: 1959 to present. - 1958: IBM first mainframes introduced. - 1965: Less expensive DEC minicomputers introduced. Personal computer era: 1981 to present. - 1981: Introduction of IBM PC. - Proliferation in 80s, 90s resulted in growth of personal software. Client/server era: 1983 to present. - Desktop clients networked to servers, with processing work split between clients and servers. - Network may be two-tiered or multitiered (N-tiered). - Various types of servers (network, application, Web). Enterprise computing era: 1992 to present - Move toward integrating disparate networks, applications using Internet standards and enterprise applications. Cloud and mobile computing: 2000 to present - Cloud computing: computing power and software applications supplied over the Internet or other network. - Fastest growing form of computing.

HTML and HTML5

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a page description language for specifying how text, graphics, video, and sound are placed on a Web page and for creating dynamic links to other Web pages and objects. Using these links, a user need only point at a highlighted keyword or graphic, click on it, and immediately be transported to another document.

(still under challenges of managing IT infrastructure and management solutions?) MAKING WISE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS

IT infrastructure is a major investment for the firm. If too much is spent on infrastructure, it lies idle and constitutes a drag on the firm's financial performance. If too little is spent, important business services cannot be delivered and the firm's competitors (who spent just the right amount) will outperform the under-investing firm. How much should the firm spend on infrastructure? This question is not easy to answer. A related question is whether a firm should purchase and maintain its own IT infrastructure components or rent them from external suppliers, including those offering cloud services. The decision either to purchase your own IT assets or rent them from external providers is typically called the rent-versus- buy decision. Cloud computing may be a low-cost way to increase scalability and flexibility, but firms should evaluate this option carefully in light of security requirements and impact on business processes and workflows. In some instances, the cost of renting software adds up to more than purchasing and maintaining an application in-house. Yet there may be benefits to using cloud services, if this allows the company to focus on core business issues instead of technology challenges. Total cost of ownership of technology assets: - The actual cost of owning technology resources includes the original cost of acquiring and installing hardware and software, as well as ongoing administration costs for hardware and software upgrades, maintenance, technical support, training, and even utility and real estate costs for running and housing the technology. The total cost of ownership (TCO) model can be used to analyse these direct and indirect costs to help firms determine the actual cost of specific technology implementations. When all these cost components are considered, the TCO for a PC might run up to three times the original purchase price of the equipment. Although the purchase price of a wireless handheld for a corporate employee may run several hundred dollars, the TCO for each device is much higher, ranging from $1,000 to $3,000, according to various consultant estimates. Gains in productivity and efficiency from equipping employees with mobile computing devices must be balanced against increased costs from integrating these devices into the firm's IT infrastructure and from providing technical support. Other cost components include fees for wireless airtime, end-user training, help desk support, and software for special applications. Costs are higher if the mobile devices run many different applications or need to be integrated into back-end systems such as enterprise applications. Hardware and software acquisition costs account for only about 20 percent of TCO, so managers must pay close attention to administration costs to under- stand the full cost of the firm's hardware and software. In addition to switching to cloud services, these firms could reduce their TCO through greater centralisation and standardisation of their hardware and software resources. Companies could reduce the size of the information systems staff required to support their infrastructure if the firm minimises the number of different computer models and pieces of software that employees are allowed to use. In a centralised infrastructure, systems can be administered from a central location and troubleshooting can be performed from that location.

cloud computing consists of three different types of services:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):Customers use processing, storage, networking, and other computing resources from cloud service providers to run their information systems. For example, Amazon uses the spare capacity of its IT infrastructure to provide a broadly based cloud environment selling IT infrastructure services. These include its Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing customers' data and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for running their applications. Users pay only for the amount of computing and storage capacity they actually use. (See the Interactive Session on Organisations). Platform as a Service (PaaS): Customers use infrastructure and programming tools supported by the cloud service provider to develop their own applications. For example, IBM offers a Smart Business Application Development & Test service for software development and testing on the IBM Cloud. Another example is Salesforce.com's Force.com, which allows developers to build applications that are hosted on its servers as a service. Software as a Service (SaaS):Customers use software hosted by the vendor on the vendor's cloud infrastructure and delivered over a network. Leading examples are Google Apps, which provides common business applications online and Salesforce.com, which also leases customer relationship management and related software services over the Internet. Both charge users an annual subscription fee, although Google provides a free version of some of its business productivity tools. Users access these applications from a Web browser, and the data and software are maintained on the providers' remote servers.

components of IT infrastructure

It infrastructure today is composed of seven major components These components constitute investments that must be coordinated with one another to provide the firm with a coherent infrastructure 1. Computer hardware platforms - Dell - IBM - HP - Apple 2. Operating Systems Platforms - Microsoft Windows - Unix - Linux - Mac OS X - Chrome - Android - iOS 3. Enterprise Software Applications - SAP - Oracle - Microsoft - IBM 4. Networking / Telecommunications - Linux - Cisco - Alcatel - Lucent - AT&T, Verizon 5. Consultants and Systems Integrations - IBM - HP - Accenture 6. Data Management and Storage - IBM DB2 - Oracle - SQL 7. Internet Platforms - Apache - Microsoft IIS - Unix - Cisco Java

Software for the Web: Java, HTML, and HTML5

Java is an operating system-independent, processor-independent, object- oriented programming language that has become the leading interactive environment for the Web. Java was created by James Gosling and the Green Team at Sun Microsystems in 1992. In November 13, 2006, Sun released much of Java as open source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), completing the process on May 8, 2007. The Java platform has migrated into cell phones, smartphones, automobiles, music players, game machines, and into set-top cable television systems serving interactive content and pay-per-view services. Java software is designed to run on any computer or computing device, regardless of the specific microprocessor or operating system the device uses. Java is the most popular development platform for mobile devices running the Android operating system. For each of the computing environments in which Java is used, Sun created a Java Virtual Machine that interprets Java programming code for that machine. In this manner, the code is written once and can be used on any machine for which there exists a Java Virtual Machine.

Competitive Forces Model for IT Infrastructure Investment

Market demand for your firm's services: Make an inventory of the services you currently provide to customers, suppliers, and employees. Survey each group, or hold focus groups to find out if the services you currently offer are meeting the needs of each group. For example, are customers complaining of slow responses to their queries about price and availability? Are employees complaining about the difficulty of finding the right information for their jobs? Are suppliers complaining about the difficulties of discovering your production requirements? Your firm's business strategy: Analyse your firm's five-year business strategy and try to assess what new services and capabilities will be required to achieve strategic goals. Your firm's IT strategy, infrastructure, and cost: Examine your firm's information technology plans for the next five years and assess its alignment with the firm's business plans. Determine the total IT infrastructure costs. You will want to perform a TCO analysis. If your firm has no IT strategy, you will need to devise one that takes into account the firm's five-year strategic plan. Information technology assessment: Is your firm behind the technology curve or at the bleeding edge of information technology? Both situations are to be avoided. It is usually not desirable to spend resources on advanced technologies that are still experimental, often expensive, and sometimes unreliable. You want to spend on technologies for which standards have been established and IT vendors are competing on cost, not design, and where there are multiple suppliers. However, you do not want to put off investment in new technologies or allow competitors to develop new business models and capabilities based on the new technologies. Competitor firm services: Try to assess what technology services competitors offer to customers, suppliers, and employees. Competitor firm IT infrastructure: Benchmark your expenditures for IT infrastructure against your competitors.

2. Operating systems platforms

Microsoft Windows Server comprises about 35 percent of the server operating system market, with 65 percent of corporate servers using some form of the Unix operating system or Linux, an inexpensive and robust open source relative of Unix. Unix and Linux are scalable, reliable, and much less expensive than mainframe operating systems. They can also run on many different types of processors. The major providers of Unix operating systems are IBM, HP, and Sun, each with slightly different and partially incompatible versions. At the client level, 90 percent of PCs use some form of the Microsoft Windows operating system (such as Windows 8, Windows 7, or Windows Vista) to manage the resources and activities of the computer. However, there is now a much greater variety of operating systems than in the past, with new operating systems for computing on handheld mobile digital devices or cloud-connected computers.

Linux and Open Source Software

Open source software is software produced by a community of several hundred thousand programmers around the world. According to the leading open source professional association, OpenSource.org, open source software is free and can be modified by users. Works derived from the original code must also be free, and the software can be redistributed by the user without additional licensing. Open source software is by definition not restricted to any specific operating system or hardware technology, although most open source software is currently based on a Linux or Unix operating system.

Linux

Perhaps the most well-known open source software is Linux, an operating system related to Unix. Linux was created by the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and first posted on the Internet in August 1991. Linux applications are embedded in cell phones, smartphones, tablet computers and consumer electronics. Linux is available in free versions downloadable from the Internet or in low-cost commercial versions that include tools and support from vendors such as Red Hat. Although Linux is not used in many desktop systems, it is a leading operating system on servers, mainframe computers, and supercomputers. Linux has become the operating system of choice in the high performance computing market, powering 97 percent of the world's fastest computers. IBM, HP, Intel, Dell, and Oracle have made Linux a central part of their offerings to corporations. The popular Android operating system for mobile devices has a Linux foundation. The rise of open source software, particularly Linux and the applications it supports, has profound implications for corporate software platforms: cost reduction, reliability and resilience, and integration, because Linux works on all the major hardware platforms from mainframes to servers to clients.

Quantum computing

Quantum computing is an emerging technology with the potential to dramatically boost computer processing power to find answers to problems that would take conventional computers many years to solve. Quantum computing uses the principles of quantum physics to represent data and perform operations on these data. A quantum computer would gain enormous processing power through the ability to be in many different states at once, allowing it to perform multiple operations simultaneously and solve some scientific and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today. Researchers at IBM, MIT, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have been working on quantum computing, and the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin has purchased a quantum computer for commercial use.

The mobile digital platform

Smartphones and tablet computers are becoming an important means of accessing the Internet. These devices are increasingly used for business computing as well as for consumer applications. For example, senior executives at General Motors are using smartphone applications that drill down into vehicle sales information, financial performance, manufacturing metrics, and project management status. Wearable computing devices are another recent addition to the mobile digital platform. These include smartwatches, smart glasses, smart badges, and activity trackers. Wearable computing technology is still in its infancy, but it already has business uses.

consumerisation of IT and BYOD

The popularity, ease of use, and rich array of useful applications for smartphones and tablet computers have created a groundswell of interest in allowing employees to use their personal mobile devices in the workplace, a phenomenon popularly called "bring your own device" (BYOD). BYOD is one aspect of the consumerisation of IT, in which new information technology that first emerges in the consumer market spreads into business organisations. Consumerisation of IT includes not only mobile personal devices but also business uses of software services that originated in the consumer marketplace as well, such as Google and Yahoo search, Gmail, Google Apps, Dropbox (see Chapter 2), and even Facebook and Twitter. Consumerisation of IT is forcing businesses, especially large enterprises, to rethink the way they obtain and manage information technology equipment and services. Historically, at least in large firms, the IT department was responsible for selecting and managing the information technology and applications used by the firm and its employees. It furnished employees with desktops or laptops that were able to access corporate systems securely. The IT department maintained control over the firm's hardware and software to ensure that the business was being protected and that information systems served the purposes of the firm and its management. Today, employees and business departments are playing a much larger role in technology selection, in many cases demanding that employees be able to use their own personal computers, smartphones, and tablets to access the corporate network. It is more difficult for the firm to manage and control these consumer technologies, and make sure they serve the needs of the business.

what are the current trends in computer software platforms?

There are four major themes in contemporary software platform evolution: - Linux and open source software - Java, HTML, and HTML 5 - Web services and service-oriented architecture - Software outsourcing and cloud services

The right technology at the right price can improve organisational performance.

Toyota Europe was able to use contemporary cloud technology infrastructure to improve the quality of its service, enhance security, and reduce operating. But it wasn't just technology that needed updating. Toyota also changed its entire philosophy of how to maintain vehicles using embedded computers in vehicles. In addition, it needed to change how it supported its 3,100 dealers. Rather than sending expensive staff members to each dealer, they were able to rely instead on the cloud-based solution to provide support. Rather than rely on visits from headquarters IT staff, dealers were now expected to maintain their local PCs using the company's new management software. The solution is serving important management goals: lower cost, better security, and better management of the dealer PC network.

virtualisation

Virtualisation is the process of presenting a set of computing resources (such as computing power or data storage) so that they can all be accessed in ways that are not restricted by physical configuration or geographic location. Virtualisation enables a single physical resource (such as a server or a storage device) to appear to the user as multiple logical resources. For example, a server or mainframe can be configured to run many instances of an operating system (or different operating systems) so that it acts like many different machines. Each virtual server "looks" like a real physical server to software programs, and multiple virtual servers can run in parallel on a single machine. Virtualisation also enables multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) to appear as a single logical resource, as would be the case with storage area networks. VMware is the leading virtualisation software vendor for Windows and Linux servers.

cloud computing

cloud computing is a model of computing in which computer processing, storage, software, and other services are provided as a pool of virtualised resources over a network, primarily the Internet. These "clouds" of computing resources can be accessed on an as-needed basis from any connected device and location. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as having the following essential characteristics: - On-demand self service: Consumers can obtain computing capabilities such as server time or network storage as needed automatically on their own. - Ubiquitous network access: Cloud resources can be accessed using standard network and Internet devices, including mobile platforms. - Location-independent resource pooling: Computing resources are pooled to serve multiple users, with different virtual resources dynamically assigned according to user demand. The user generally does not know where the computing resources are located. - Rapid elasticity: Computing resources can be rapidly provisioned, increased, or decreased to meet changing user demand. - Measured service: Charges for cloud resources are based on amount of resources actually used.

green computing

green computing or green IT, refers to practices and technologies for designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated devices such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems to minimise impact on the environment. Reducing computer power consumption has been a very high "green" priority. Information technology is responsible for about 2 percent of total U.S. power demand and is believed to contribute about 2 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. A corporate data centre can easily consume more than 100 times more power than a standard office building. All this additional power consumption has a negative impact on the environment and corporate operating costs. The chapter-opening case on Portugal Telecom illustrates some of the technologies and data centre design considerations for green computing and the business and environmental benefits of cutting power consumption in the data center.