MIS 311 - Chapter 5 - MIS Infrastructures

Network

A communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate

Server

A computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests

Client

A computer designed to request information from a server

Disaster Recovery Plan

A detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster

Enterprise Architect

A person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business

Hot Site

A separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business

Cold site

A separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is a place where employees can move after a disaster

Warm site

A separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration

Emergency

A sudden, unexpected event requiring immediate action due to potential threat to health and safety, the environment, or property

Vulnerability

A system weakness that can be exploited by a threat

Backup

An exact copy of a system's information

Emergency Notification Service

An infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency

Green Personal Computer (green PC)

Built using environment-friendly materials and designed to save energy

Disaster recovery cost curve

Charts (1) The cost to the company of the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the company of recovering from a disaster over time

How should companies choose a backup and recovery strategy?

Choose one that is in line with the company goals and operational needs

Storage Virtualization

Combines multiple network storage devices so they appear to be a single storage device

Network Virtualization

Combines networks by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned in real time to a specific device

Corporate Social Responsibility

Companies' acknowledged responsibility to society

Hardware

Consists of the physical devices associated with the computer system

Incident Record

Contains all of the details about an incident

Cloud Audit

Creates a standard way for cloud providers to simplify the process of gathering audit data and communicate how they address security, governance, and compliance

Low-cost, low-speed backup method

DVDs and thumb drives

Scalability

Describes how well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth

Sustainable (green) MIS

Describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment

Emergency Preparedness

Ensures that a company is ready to respond to an emergency in an unorganized, timely, and effective manner

Reliability (or accuracy)

Ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information

Technology Recovery Strategies

Focus specifically on prioritizing the order for restoring hardware, software, and data across the organization that best meets business recovery requirements

Serviceability

How quickly a third party can change a system to ensure it meets user needs and the terms of any contracts, including agreed levels of reliability, maintainability, or availability

Business Impact Analysis

Identifies all critical business functions and the effect that a specific disaster may have on them

Carbon Emissions

Includes the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere produced by business processes and systems (30% of electrical power comes from burning coal)

Agile MIS Infrastructure

Includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization's goals. It supports change. -Accessibility -Availability -Maintainability -Portability -Reliability -Scalability -Usability

MIS Infrastructure

Includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets

Hybrid cloud

Includes two or more private, public, or community clouds, but each cloud remains separate as is only linked by technology that enables data and application portability

High availability

Occurs when a system is continuously operational at all times (99.999% of the time)

Technology Failure

Occurs when the ability of a company to operate is impaired because of a hardware, software, or data outage

Web Accessibility

People with disabilities can use the web

Public Cloud

Promoted massive, global, and industry-wide applications offered to the general public -Customers never required to manage hardware or software -Utility-style fees

Availability

Refers to the time frames when the system is operational

Accessibility (Agile MIS #1)

Refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system

Upcycle

Reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product

Information MIS Infrastructure

Supports Operations by identifying where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured -Backup -Recovery -Disaster Recovery -Business Continuity Planning

Sustainable MIS Infrastructure

Supports sustainability by identifying ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption. -Grid computing -Cloud computing -Virtualization

Portability

The ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems

System Virtualization

The ability to present the resources of a single computer as if it is a collection of separate computers ("virtual machines"), each with its own virtual CPUs, network interfaces, storage, and operating systems

Energy Consumption

The amount of energy consumed by business processes and systems

Usability

The degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use

Capacity

The maximum throughput a system can deliver

Incident Management

The process responsible for managing how incidents are identified and corrected

Software

The set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks

Cloud Fabric

The software that makes possible the benefits of cloud computing, such as multi-tenancy -Allows a business to make its data and applications accessible, available, maintainable, portable, reliable, scalable, and usable

Incidents

Unplanned interruptions of a service

Administrator Access

Unrestricted access to the entire system

Cloud Bursting

When a company uses its own computing infrastructure for normal usage and accesses the cloud when it needs to scale for peak load requirements, ensuring a sudden spike in usage does not result in poor performances or system crashes

Unavailable

When a system is not operating and cannot be used

Business Continuity Planning

details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption

Failback

occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operation, taking over from the secondary server

Recovery

the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup

Singletenancy

-Each customer or tenant must purchase and maintain an individual system -Service provider would have to update its system in every company where the software was running

Data as a Service (DaaS)

-Facilitates the accessibility of business-critical data in a timely,secure, and affordable manner

Sustainable MIS Infrastructure Components

-Grid Computing -Virtualization -Cloud Computing (See individual cards for more detail)

Maintainability (Flexibility)

-How quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes -Helps to measure how quickly and effectively asystem can be changed or repaired after a failure Ex) Not considering the possibility of going global

Performance

-How quickly a system performs a process or transaction -Performance is a key component of scalability

Multi-Tenancy

-In the cloud means that a single instance of a system serves multiple customers -Helps reduce operational costs associated with implementing large systems because the costs are dispersed across many tenants -The cloud is an example

Benefits of Virtualization

-Increases availability of applications that can give a higher level of performance -Increases energy efficiency by requiring less hardware to run multiple systems or applications -Increases hardware usability by running multiple operating systems on a single computer

Security as a Service (SaaS)

-Involves applications such as anti-virus software delivered over the Internet with constant virus definition updates that are not reliant on user compliance -AKA Cloud Security

Utility Computing

-Offers a pay-per-use revenue model similar to a metered service such as gas or electricity

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

-Offers backup services that use cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by disaster -Typically a part of a disaster recovery plan or business continuity Ex) Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud

Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS)

-Offers enterprise communication and collaboration services over the Internet such as instant messaging systems, online meetings, and video conferencing

Benefits of a solid MIS infrastructure

-Reduce costs -Improve productivity -Optimize business operations -Generate growth -Increase Profitability

Noisy Neighbor

-Refers to a multi-tenancy co-tenant that monopolizes bandwidth, servers, CPUs, and other resources that cause network performance issues

Ewaste

-Refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices -Increased demand (Moore's Law) is causing an increase in Ewaste -A PC has a life expectancy of 3-5 years, cell phone is less than two years

Moore's Law

-Refers to the computer chip performance per dollar doubling every 18 months -Great for companies because they can acquire large amounts of MIS equipment for cheaper and cheaper costs

Community Cloud

-Serves a specific community with common business models, security requirements, and compliance considerations

Private cloud

-Serves only one customer or organization and can be located on the customer's premises or off the customer's premises -Optimal solution for an organization (i.e. government) that has high data security concerns and values privacy -Expensive

Cloud Computing

-Stores, manages, and processes data and applications over the Internet rather than on a personal computer or server -Makes it easier to gain access to the computing power that was once reserved for large corporations

Clean Computing

-Subset of sustainable MIS -The environmentally responsible use, manufacture, and disposal of technology products and computer equipment -Specifically focused on the production of environmental waste

Dynamic Scaling

-The MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements

Fault tolerance

-The ability for a system to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service -Expensive -Should be used by mission-critical operations

Sustainable MIS Disposal

-The safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle -Ensures that ewaste does not end up in landfills, causing environmental issues

Hybrid Cloud Storage

-Uses both on-site and off-site resources to store corporate data -Frequently used data is stored on-site and inactive data is stored off-site in the cloud

Effects of Disasters on Business Operations

1) Disrupting Communications 2) Damaging Physical Infrastructure 3) Halting Transportation 4) Blocking Utilities

Three Pressures Driving Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

1. Carbon Emissions 2. Energy Consumption 3. Ewaste (see individual flashcards)

Cloud Service Delivery Models

1. Infrastructure as a Service 2. Software as a Service 3. Platform as a Service (See individual flashcards_

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

1. On-Demand Self-Service (Users can increase storage and processing power as needed) 2. Broad Network Access (All devices can access data and applications) 3. Multi-Tenancy (Customers share pooled computing resources) 4. Rapid Elasticity (Storage, network bandwidth, and computing capacity can be increased or decreased immediately, allowing for optimal scalability) 5. Measured Service (Clients can monitor and measure transactions and use of resources)

Cloud Computing Environments

1. Private Cloud 2. Public Cloud 3. Hybrid Cloud 4. Community Cloud (see individual cards)

Three Basic Categories of Virtualization

1. Storage Virtualization 2. Network Visualization 3. Server Visualization (Refer to individual flashcards)

SaaS Extensions

1.Data as a Service (DaaS) 2. Security as a Service (SaaS) 3. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) (See individual flashcards)

Grid Computing

-A collection of computers, often geographically dispersed that are coordinated to solve a common problem -A problem is broken into pieces and distributed to many machines, allowing faster processing than could occur with a single server -Allows greater scalability

Data Center

-A facility used to hone management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems -"Server farms" - consume power and require cooling and floor space

Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)

-A nonprofit organization that promotes research into best practices for securing cloud computing and cloud delivery models

Failover

-A specific type of fault tolerance, occurs when a redundant storage server offers an exact replica of the real-time data, and if the primary server crashes, the users are automatically directed to the secondary server or backup server -High speed, high cost

Cloud Fabric Controller

-An individual who monitors and provisions cloud resources, similar to a server administrator at an individual company

Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

-Brings together people from industry, disability organizations, government, and research labs from around the world to develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities including auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities -Goal is to allow people to access the full potential of the web, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally

Ways for Data Centers to become more sustainable

-Carbon Emissions (reduce energy consumption) -Floor Space (Store greater amounts of information is less space) -Geographic Location (resources are inexpensive, clean, and available)

Server Virtualization

-Combines the physical resources, such as servers, processors, and operating systems, from the applications -Most common form of virtualization

Virtualization

-Creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device -Ex.) All in one printer, fax, and copy machine

Software as a Service (SaaS)

-Delivers applications over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model Ex) Salesforce

Smart Grid

-Delivers electricity using two-way digital technology -Meant to solve the problem of the world's outdated electrical grid -More efficient and reliable -Current grid is past its useful life by 30 years -Provides users with real-time usage monitoring

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

-Delivers hardware networking capabilities, including the use of servers, networking, and storage, over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model -The customer rents the hardware and provides its own custom applications or programs

Capacity Planning

-Determines future environmental infrastructure requirements to ensure high-quality system performance -It's cheaper to design and implement agile infrastructure that envisions growth requirements than to update all the equipment after the system is already operational