BIS CHAP 5 - Lecture notes 5 PDF

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Chapter 5 gives information about sustainable technologies and how an MIS infrastructure helps business operations....

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CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies MIS infrastructure, which includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets. A solid MIS infrastructure can reduce costs, improve productivity, optimize business operations, generate growth, and increase profitability. Hardware consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system Software is the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks A network is a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate Specific form of network infrastructure:  

A client is a computer designed to request information from a server. A server is a computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests. A good way to understand this is when someone uses a web browser (this would be the client) to access a website (this would be a server that would respond with the web page being requested by the client).

An enterprise architect is a person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business. Firms employ enterprise architects to help manage change and dynamically update MIS infrastructure.

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Supporting operations: Information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

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Supporting change: Agile MIS infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals.

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies 

Supporting the environment: Sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.

A/ SUPPORTING OPERATIONS: INFORMATION MIS INFRASTRUCTURE To support continuous business operations, an information infrastructure provides three primary elements: 

Backup and recovery plan

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Disaster recovery plan

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Business continuity plan

A backup is an exact copy of a system’s information. Recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup. (If the company deals with large volumes of critical information, it will require daily, perhaps hourly, backups to storage servers. If it relies on small amounts of noncritical, then it might require only weekly backups to external hard drives or thumb drives. A company that backs up on a weekly basis is taking the risk that, if a system crash occurs, it could lose a week’s worth of work) Fault tolerance is 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. For example, fault tolerance enables a business to support continuous business operations if there is a power failure or flood. 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. This is a high-speed and high-cost method of backup and recovery. Failback occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations, taking over from the secondary server. a disaster recovery plan, which is a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster. This plan includes such factors as which files and systems need to have backups and their corresponding frequency and methods along with the strategic location of the storage in a separate physical site that is geographically dispersed. A hot site is a separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business. A cold site is a separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is a place where employees can move after a disaster. A warm site is a separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration A disaster recovery plan usually has a disaster recovery cost curve to support it. A 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.

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies An emergency is a sudden, unexpected event requiring immediate action due to potential threat to health and safety, the environment, or property. Emergency preparedness ensures that a company is ready to respond to an emergency in an organized, timely, and effective manner. Business continuity planning (BCP), which details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption. BCP includes such factors as identifying critical systems, business processes, departments, and the maximum amount of time the business can continue to operate without functioning systems. BCP contains disaster recovery plans along with many additional plans, including prioritizing business impact analysis, emergency notification plans, and technology recovery strategies. Business Impact Analysis A business impact analysis identifies all critical business functions and the effect that a specific disaster may have on them. A business impact analysis is primarily used to ensure that a company has made the right decisions about the order of recovery priorities and strategies. For example, should the accounting department have its systems up and running before the sales and marketing departments? Will email be the first system for recovery to ensure that employees can communicate with each other and outside stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and partners? Emergency Notification Services A business continuity plan typically includes an emergency notification service, that is, an infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency. Radio stations’ occasional tests of the national Emergency Alert System are an example of a very large-scale emergency notification system. A firm will implement an emergency notification service to warn employees of unexpected events and provide them with instructions about how to handle the situation. Technology Recovery Strategies Companies create massive amounts of data vital to their survival and continued operations. A technology failure occurs when the ability of a company to operate is impaired because of a hardware, software, or data outage. Technology failures can destroy large amounts of vital data, often causing incidents, unplanned interruptions of a service. An incident record contains all of the details of an incident. Incident management is the process responsible for managing how incidents are identified and corrected. Technology recovery strategies focus specifically on prioritizing the order for restoring hardware, software, and data across the organization that best meets business recovery requirements. A technology recovery strategy details the order of importance for recovering hardware, software, data centers, and networking (or connectivity).

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

B/ SUPPORTING CHANGE: AGILE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE The characteristics of agile MIS infrastructures can help ensure that your systems can meet and perform under any unexpected or unplanned changes

Accessibility Accessibility refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system Top-level MIS employees require administrator access: unrestricted access to the entire system. Administrator access can perform functions such as resetting passwords, deleting accounts, and shutting down entire systems Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web. The 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. The goal of WAI is to allow people to access the full potential of the web, enabling people with disabilities to participate equally. For example, Apple includes screen magnification and VoiceOver on its iPhone, iPad, and iPod, which allows the blind and visually impaired to use the devices.

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies Availability In a 24/7/365 ebusiness environment, business professionals need to use their systems whenever they want from wherever they want. Availability refers to the time frames when the system is operational. A system is called unavailable when it is not operating and cannot be used. High availability occurs when a system is continuously operational at all times. Maintainability Maintainability (or flexibility) refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes. Maintainability helps to measure how quickly and effectively a system can be changed or repaired after a failure. For example, when starting a small business, you might not consider that you will have global customers, a common mistake. Portability Portability refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems. Apple’s iTunes is readily available to users of Mac computers and PC computers, smart phones, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and so on. It is also a portable application. Reliability Reliability (or accuracy) ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information. Inaccuracy can occur for many reasons, from the incorrect entry of information to the corruption of information during transmissions. A vulnerability is a system weakness, such as a password that is never changed or a system left on while an employee goes to lunch, that can be exploited by a threat. Performance measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction. Performance is a key component of scalability as systems that can’t scale suffer from performance issues. Just imagine your college’s content management system suddenly taking five minutes to return a page after a button is pushed. Now imagine if this occurs during your midterm exam and you miss the two-hour deadline because the system is so slow. Capacity represents the maximum throughput a system can deliver; for example, the capacity of a hard drive represents its size or volume. Capacity planning determines future environmental infrastructure requirements to ensure high-quality system performance. If a company purchases connectivity software that is outdated or too slow to meet demand, its employees will waste a great deal of time waiting for systems to respond to user requests. It is cheaper for a company to design and implement agile infrastructure that envisions growth requirements than to update all the equipment after the system is already operational. If a company with 100 workers merges with another company and suddenly 400 people are using the system, performance time could suffer. Usability Usability is the degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use. Providing hints, tips, shortcuts, and instructions for any system, regardless of its ease of use, is recommended. Apple understood the importance of usability when it designed the first iPod. One of the iPod’s initial

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies attractions was the usability of the click wheel. One simple and efficient button operates the iPod, making it usable for all ages. Serviceability is 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. When using a system from a third party, it is important to ensure the right level of serviceability for all users, including remote employees. Scalability: ability to scaleup and adapt to increased demands of growth. MIS AND THE ENVIRONMENT Moore’s Law, refers to the computer chip performance per dollar doubling every 18 months. Although Moore originally assumed a two-year period, many sources today refer to the 18-month figure. Sustainable, or green, MIS describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment. Sustainable MIS is a critical part of corporate social responsibility, that is, companies’ acknowledged responsibility to society. Clean computing, a subset of sustainable MIS, refers to the environmentally responsible use, manufacture, and disposal of technology products and computer equipment A green personal computer (green PC) is built using environment-friendly materials and designed to save energy. Three Pressures Driving Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

Increased Electronic Waste The fulfillment of Moore’s Law has made technological devices smaller, cheaper, and faster, allowing more people from all income levels to purchase computing equipment. This increased demand is causing numerous environmental issues.

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies Ewaste refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices. Ewaste includes CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, printer cartridges, cell phones, iPods, external hard drives, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, microwaves, and so on. An upcycle reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product. Sustainable MIS disposal refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle. It ensures that ewaste does not end up in landfills, causing environmental issues. A single computer contains more than 700 chemicals; some are toxic, such as mercury, lead, and cadmium. If a computer ends up in a landfill, the toxic substances it contains can leach into our land, water, and air. Recycling costs from $15 to $50 for a monitor or computer. Increased Energy Consumption Energy consumption is the amount of energy consumed by business processes and systems. Huge increases in technology use have greatly amplified energy consumption. The energy consumed by a computer is estimated to produce as much as 10 percent of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by an automobile. Increased Carbon Emissions Additional temperature increases are projected over the next 100 years, with serious consequences for Earth’s environment, if carbon emissions, including the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide produced by business processes and systems, are not reduced. C/ SUPPORTING THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE Grid Computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. . With grid computing, a problem is broken into pieces and distributed to many machines, allowing faster processing than could occur with a single system. Computers typically use less than 25 percent of their processing power, leaving more than 75 percent available for other tasks. Solving the Energy Issue with Smart Grids A smart grid delivers electricity using two-way digital technology. It is meant to solve the problem of the world’s outdated electrical grid, making it more efficient and reliable by adding the ability to monitor, analyze, and control the transmission of power remotely. The current U.S. power grid is said to have outlived its life expectancy by as much as 30 years. Smart grids provide users with real-time usage monitoring, allowing them to choose off-peak times for noncritical or less urgent applications or processes. Virtualized Computing Virtualization creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device. A good analogy is a computer printer. In the past, you had to purchase a fax machine, copy machine, answering machine, and computer printer separately. This was expensive, required enough energy to run four machines, and created additional amounts of ewaste. Today, you can buy a virtualized computer printer that functions as a fax machine, answering machine, and copy machine all on one physical machine, thereby reducing costs, power requirements, and ewaste.

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

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.

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Server virtualization combines the physical resources, such as servers, processors, and operating systems, from the applications. (This is the most common form, and typically, when you hear the term virtualization, you can assume server virtualization.)

Virtualization is also one of the easiest and quickest ways to achieve a sustainable MIS infrastructure because it reduces power consumption and requires less equipment that needs to be manufactured, maintained, and later disposed of safely. Managers no longer have to assign servers, storage, or network capacity permanently to single applications. Instead, they can assign the hardware resources when and where they are needed, achieving the availability, flexibility, and scalability a company needs to thrive and grow. System virtualization is 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 system. Ways for Data Centers to Become Sustainable

Cloud Computing cloud computing stores, manages, and processes data and applications over the Internet rather than on a personal computer or server. Cloud computing offers new ways to store, access, process, and analyze information and connect people and resources from any location in the world an Internet connection is available. Multi-tenancy in the cloud means that a single instance of a system serves multiple customers. In the cloud, each customer is called a tenant, and multiple tenants can access the same system. Multi-tenancy helps reduce operational costs associated with implementing large systems because the costs are dispersed across many tenants as opposed to single tenancy, in which each customer or tenant must purchase and maintain an individual system. A noisy neighbor refers to a multi-tenancy co-tenant that monopolizes bandwidth, servers, CPUs, and other resources that cause network performance issues. The noisy neighbor effect occurs when one

CHAPTER 5: Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies tenant uses the majority of available resources and causes network performance issues for others on the shared infrastructure. The cloud fabric is the software that makes possible the benefits of cloud computing, such as multitenancy. A cloud fabric controller is an individual who monitors and provisions cloud resources, similar to a server administrator at an individual company. The cloud offers a company higher availability, greater reliability, and improved accessibility—all with affordable high-speed access. For flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency, cloud computing is quickly becoming a viable option for companies of all sizes. With the cloud, you could simply purchase a single license for software such as Microsoft Office or Outlook at a far discounted rate and not worry about the hassle of installing and upgrading the software on your computer Characteristics of Cloud Computing

Public Cloud Public cloud promotes massive, global, and industrywide applications offered to the general public. In a public cloud, customers are never required to provision, manage, upgrade, or replace hardware or software. A few great examples of public cloud computing include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Azure, and Google Cloud Connect. Private Cloud P...