1. CHAPTER FIVE INFRASTRUCTURES: SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES
Technical architecture refers to the structured process of designing and building software architecture, with focus on interaction with software and hardware developers. Technical architecture is a part of software architecture, which focuses on how to deal with certain aspects of the software engineering process. It allows us to design better systems by:
Meeting system requirements and objectives: Both functional and non-functional requirements can be prioritized as "must have", "should have" or "want", where "must have" identifies properties that the system must have in order to be acceptable. An architecture allows us to evaluate and make tradeoffs among requirements of differing priority. Though system qualities (also known as non-functional requirements) can be compromised later in the development process, many will not be met if not explicitly taken into account at the architectural level.
Enabling flexible partitioning of the system: A good architecture enables flexible distribution of the system by allowing the system and its constituent applications to be partitioned among processors in many different ways without having to redesign the distributable component parts. This requires careful attention to the distribution potential of components early in the architectural design process.
Reducing cost of maintenance and evolution: Architecture can help minimize the costs of maintaining and evolving a given system over its entire lifetime by anticipating the main kinds of changes that will occur in the system, ensuring that the system's overall design will facilitate such changes, and localizing as far as possible the effects of such changes on design documents, code, and other system work products. This can be achieved by the minimization and control of subsystem interdependencies.
Increasing reuse and integration with legacy and third party software: An architecture may be designed to enable and facilitate the (re)use of certain existing components, frameworks, class libraries, legacy or third-party applications, etc..

2. CHAPTER OVERVIEW SECTION 5.1 – MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
The Business Benefits of a Solid MIS Infrastructure
Supporting Operations: Information MIS Infrastructure
Supporting Change: Agile MIS Infrastructure
SECTION 5.2 – BUILDING SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURES
MIS and the Environment
Supporting the Environment: Sustainable MIS Infrastructure

3. SECTION 5.1 MIS INFRASTRUCTURES
CLASSROOM OPENER
Top Ten Data Failure Stories
10. PhD Almost an F -- A PhD candidate lost his entire dissertation when a bad power supply suddenly zapped his computer and damaged the USB Flash drive that stored the document. Had the data not been recovered, the student would not have graduated.
9. Suffering from Art -- While rearranging her home office, a woman accidentally dropped a five pound piece of clay pottery on her laptop, directly onto the hard drive area that contained a book she'd been working on for five years and 150 year-old genealogy pictures that had not yet been printed.
8. Domestic Dilemma -- A husband deleted all of his child's baby pictures when he accidentally hit the wrong button on his computer. His wife hinted at divorce if he did not get the pictures back.
7. Bite Worse than Bark -- A customer left his memory stick lying out and his dog mistook it for a chew toy.
6. Don't Try this at Home -- A man attempting to recover data from his computer on his own found the job too challenging mid-way through and ended up sending Ontrack his completely disassembled drive -- with each of its parts in a separate baggie.
5. Out of Time -- A clockmaker suffered a system meltdown, losing the digital designs for all of its clocks. Ontrack literally beat the clock recovering all their data just in time for an important international tradeshow.
4. Drilling for Data -- During a multi-drive RAID recovery, engineers discovered one drive belonging in the set was missing. The customer found the missing drive in a dumpster, but in compliance with company policy for disposing of old drives, it had a hole drilled through it.
3. Safe at Home -- After one of their executives experienced a laptop crash, the Minnesota Twins professional baseball team called on Ontrack to rescue crucial scouting information about their latest prospects. The team now relies on Ontrack for all data recoveries within its scouting and coaching ranks.
2. Hardware Problems -- A frustrated writer attacked her computer with a hammer. When the engineers received the computer, the hammer imprint was clearly visible on the top cover.
1. La Cucaracha -- In hopes of rescuing valuable company information, a customer pulled an old laptop out of a warehouse where it had been sitting unused for 10 years. When engineers opened the computer, it contained hundreds of husks of dead and decaying cockroaches.

4. LEARNING OUTCOMES
Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types
Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure
Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure
A detailed review of the learning outcomes can be found at the end of the chapter in the textbook

5. THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF A SOLID MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
MIS infrastructure – Includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets
Hardware
Software
Network
Client
Server
Hardware Consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system
Software The set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks
Network A communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate
Client A computer designed to request information from a server.
Server A computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests.
Enterprise architect A person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business

6. THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF A SOLID MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
Supporting operations
Information MIS infrastructure
Supporting change
Agile MIS Infrastructure
Supporting the environment
Sustainable MIS infrastructure
Supporting operations: Information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how
important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.
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.
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.

7. SUPPORTING OPERATIONS: INFORMATION MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
Backup and recovery plan
Disaster recovery plan
Business continuity plan
Imagine taking a quick trip to the printer on the other side of the room, and when you turn around you find that your laptop has been stolen. How painful would you find this experience? What types of information would you lose? How much time would it take you to recover all of that information? A few things you might lose include music, movies, s, assignments, saved passwords, not to mention that all-important 40-page paper that took you more than a month to complete. If this sounds painful then you want to pay particular attention to this section and learn how to eliminate this pain.
Be sure to explain to your students that an organization's backup strategy must fit the organization’s needs. If the organization only needs to backup its information daily, then there is no need to backup the information hourly Ask your students how many of them backup the information on their computers.
Ask your students what would happen if their computer crashed right now and they couldn’t recovery any of their information. Would they lose days, weeks, or months of information?
Encourage your students to research the Internet for PC backup information and create a personal information backup plan. is a great place to store important information

8. BACKUP AND RECOVERY PLAN
Backup – An exact copy of a system’s information
Recovery – The ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure
Fault tolerance
Failover
Failback
Fault tolerance A general concept that a system has the ability to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service.
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.
Failback Occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations taking over from the secondary server.
A single backup or restore failure can cost an organization more than time and money; some data cannot be recreated, and the business intelligence lost from that data can be tremendous.
Chief information officers (CIO) should have enough confidence in their backup and recovery systems that they could walk around and randomly pull out cables to prove that the systems are safe. The CIO should also be secure enough to perform this test during peak business hours.
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Backup and Recovery
Ask your students to answer the following questions:
Do you have a backup strategy for your computer?
How often do you backup?
What do you backup?
What type of format do you use for your backup?
Where do you save the backup?
How long do you save the backup?
Now ask your students that if you stole their computer or spilled a hot cup of coffee on their computer right now how much information would they lose?
Encourage your students to create a backup strategy.

9. BACKUP AND RECOVERY PLAN
Disaster recovery plan - A detailed process for recovering information or an IT system in the event of a catastrophic disaster such as a fire or flood
Disaster recovery cost curve - Charts (1) the cost to the organization of the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the organization of recovering from a disaster over time
Hurricanes, floods, fires, and many other types of natural disasters can have devastating effects on businesses.
One of the most common types of hardware failures occurs from rats, mice, and squirrels chewing on cords, cables, and devices.

10. BACKUP AND RECOVERY PLAN
Explain to your students that the optimal recovery plan in terms of costs and time is where the two lines intersect.
Organizations should choose a backup and recovery strategy that is in line with its business goals. If the organization deals with large volumes of critical information, it will require daily backups, perhaps even hourly backups, to storage servers. If the organization deals with small amounts of noncritical information, then it might require only weekly backups to tapes, CDs, or DVDs.
Deciding how often to back up information and what media to use is a critical business decision. If an organization decides to back up on a weekly basis, then it is taking the risk that, if a total system crash occurs, it could lose a week’s worth of work. If this risk is acceptable, then a weekly backup strategy will work. If this risk is unacceptable, then the organization needs to move to a daily backup strategy. Some organizations find the risk of losing a day’s worth of work too high and move to an hourly backup strategy.

11. BACKUP AND RECOVERY PLAN
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
Union Bank of California has created a disaster recovery plan that includes multiple data centers in diverse locations, mirrored sites which can take over at the flick of a switch, hot sites - where staff can walk in and start working exactly as they would if they were in their normal location - and a vast amount of redundancy.
Hot site A separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business.
Warm site A separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration.
Cold site A separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is a place where employees can move after a disaster.

12. BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN
Business continuity planning (BCP) - A plan for how an organization will recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical function(s) within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption
Emergency notification services
Natural disasters and terrorist attacks are on the minds of business professionals who take safeguarding their information assets seriously. Disaster recovery plans traditionally contained information on systems and data, ignoring cross-functional and intraorganizational issues for business processes and supply chain management. For this reason many are turning to a more comprehensive and all-encompassing plan known as business continuity planning (BCP)
Emergency notification service An infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency.

13. SUPPORTING CHANGE: AGILE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
Characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure
Accessibility
Availability
Maintainability
Portability
Reliability
Scalability
Usability
If an organization grows by 50 percent in a single year, its systems must be able to handle a 50 percent growth rate.
Systems that cannot adapt to organizational changes can severely hinder the organization’s ability to operate.
The future of an organization depends on its ability to meet its partners and customers on their terms, at their pace, any time of the day, in any geographic location.
These are commonly known as the “ilities”

14. ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility - Refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system
Administrator access – Unrestricted access to the entire system

15. AVAILABILITY Availability – Time frames when the system is operational
Unavailable – Time frames when a system is not operating and cannot be used
High availability – System is continuously operational at all times
Availability is typically measured relative to “100 percent operational” or “never failing.” A widely held but difficult-to-achieve standard of availability for a system or product is known as “five 9s” ( percent) availability.
Some companies have systems available 24x7 to support business operations and global customer and employee needs. With the emergence of the Web, companies expect systems to operate around the clock. A customer who finds that a website closes at 9:00 p.m. is not going to be a customer long.
Systems, however, must come down for maintenance, upgrades, and fixes. One challenge organizations face is determining when to schedule system downtime if the system is expected to operate continually.

16. MAINTAINABILITY
Maintainability – How quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes
Organizations must watch today’s business, as well as tomorrow’s, when designing and building systems
Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes
For example, a system might be designed to include the ability to handle multiple currencies and languages, even though the company is not currently performing business in other countries. When the company starts growing and performing business in new countries, the system will already have the flexibility to handle multiple currencies and languages. If the company failed to recognize that its business would someday be global, it would need to redesign all its systems to handle multiple currencies and languages, not easy once systems are up and running.

17. PORTABILITY
Portability – The ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms
Apple’s iTunes is readily available to users of Mac computers and also users of PC computers, smart phones, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and so on. It is also a portable application. Because Apple insists on compatibility across its products, both software and hardware, Apple can easily add to its product, device, and service offerings without sacrificing portability. Many software developers are creating programs that are portable to all three devices—the iPhone, iPod, and iPad—which increases their target market and they hope their revenue.

18. RELIABILITY
Reliability - Ensures a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information
Reliability is another term for accuracy when discussing the correctness of systems within the context of efficiency IT metrics
Inaccurate information processing occurs for many reasons, from the incorrect entry of data to information corruption. Unreliable information puts the organization at risk when making decisions based on the information.

19. SCALABILITY
Scalability - How well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth
Performance - Measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction
Capacity planning - Determines future environmental infrastructure requirements to ensure high-quality system performance
Web 2.0 is driving demand for capacity planning. Delivering entertainment-grade video over the Internet poses significant challenges as service providers scale solutions to manage millions of users, withstand periods of peak demand, and deliver a superior quality of experience while balancing network capacity and efficient capital investment. Given the success of YouTube.com and the likelihood of similar video experiences, the bandwidth required to transport the video services will continue to increase and the possibility of video degradation will become more challenging.
To ensure adaptable systems performance, capacity planning helps an organization determine future IT infrastructure requirements for new equipment and additional network capacity. It is cheaper for an organization to design and implement an IT infrastructure that envisions performance capacity growth than to update all the equipment after the system is already operational.

20. USABILITY
Usability – 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 attractions was the usability of the click wheel. One simple and efficient button operates the iPod, making it usable for all ages. And to ensure ease of use, Apple also made the corresponding iTunes software intuitive and easy to use.

21. SECTION 5.2 BUILDING SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURES
A solid enterprise architecture can decrease costs, increase standardization, promote reuse of IT assets, and speed development of new systems.
The right enterprise architecture can make IT cheaper, strategic, and more responsive.

22. LEARNING OUTCOMES
Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS
Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructures along with their business benefits
A detailed review of the learning outcomes can be found at the end of the chapter in the textbook

23. MIS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Moore’s Law - Refers to the computer chip performance per dollar doubles every 18 months
Sustainable, or “green,” MIS - Describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment
Corporate social responsibility - Companies’ acknowledged responsibility to society
The general trend in MIS is toward smaller, faster, and cheaper devices. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the world’s largest producer of computer chips or microprocessors, observed in 1965 that continued advances in technological innovation made it possible to reduce the size of a computer chip (the brains of a computer, or even a cell phone now) while doubling its capacity every two years.

24. MIS AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Three Primary Side Effects Of Businesses’ Expanded Use Of Technology
The general trend in MIS is toward smaller, faster, and cheaper devices. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, the world’s largest producer of computer chips or microprocessors, observed in 1965 that continued advances in technological innovation made it possible to reduce the size of a computer chip (the brains of a computer, or even a cell phone now) while doubling its capacity every two years.

25. INCREASED ELECTRONIC WASTE
Ewaste - Refers to discarded, obsolete or broken electronic devices
Sustainable MIS disposal - Refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle
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. 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. Some say one human year is equivalent to seven years of technological advancements. A personal computer has a life expectancy of only three to five years and a cell phone is less than two years.

26. INCREASED ENERGY CONSUMPTION
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
Computer servers in the United States account for about 1 percent of the total energy needs of the country.
Put in perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the energy consumption of Mississippi.
Computers consume energy even when they are not being used.
For convenience and to allow for automatic updates and backup, the majority of computer equipment is never completely shut down. It draws energy 24 hours a day.

27. INCREASED CARBON EMISSIONS
The major human-generated greenhouse gases, such as carbon emissions from energy use, are very likely responsible for the increases in climatic temperature over the past half a century
When left on continuously, a single desktop computer and monitor can consume at least watts of power per hour
The major human-generated greenhouse gases, such as carbon emissions from energy use, are very likely responsible for the increases in climatic temperature over the past half a century.
Additional temperature increases are projected over the next hundred years, with serious consequences for Earth’s environment, if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.
In the United States, coal provides more than 50 percent of electrical power.
When left on continuously, a single desktop computer and monitor can consume at least 100 watts of power per hour.
To generate that much energy 24 hours a day for a year would require approximately 714 pounds of coal.
When that coal is burned, it releases on average 5 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and 1,852 pounds (that is almost a ton) of carbon dioxide.

28. SUPPORTING THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE
The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure include
Grid computing
Cloud computing
Virtualized computing

29. GRID COMPUTING
Grid computing - A collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem
Grid computing - A collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem.
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. Innovatively, grid computing takes advantage of this unused processing power by linking thousands of individual computers around the world to create a “virtual supercomputer” that can process intensive tasks
Smart grid Delivers electricity using two-way digital technology.

30. CLOUD COMPUTING
Cloud computing - Refers to the use of resources and applications hosted remotely on the Internet
With cloud computing, an individual or business pays only for the services they need, when they need them and where, much as we use and pay for electricity. In the past, a company would have to pay millions of dollars for the hardware, software, and networking equipment required to implement a large system such as payroll or sales management. A cloud computing user can simply access the cloud and request a single license to a payroll application. The user does not have to incur any hardware, software, or networking expenses. As the business grows and the user requires more employees to have access to the system, the business simply purchases additional licenses. Rather than running software on a local computer or server, companies can now reach to the cloud to combine software applications, data storage, and considerable computing power.
Utility computing Offers a pay-per-use revenue model similar to a metered service such as gas or electricity.

31. CLOUD COMPUTING Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) A service that delivers hardware networking capabilities, including the use of servers, networking, and storage over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model.
Dynamic scaling Means that the MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on needed requirements.
Software as a Service (SaaS) Delivers applications over the clous using a pay-per-use revenue model.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) Supports the deployment of entire systems including hardware, networking, and applications using a pay-per-use revenue model.

32. VIRTUALIZED COMPUTING
Virtualization - Creates multiple “virtual” machines on a single computing device
Most computers and even servers typically run only one operating system, such as Windows or Mac OS, and only one application.
When a company invests in a large system such as inventory management, it dedicates a single server to house the system.
This ensures the system has enough capacity to run during peak times and to scale to meet demand.
Also, many systems have specific hardware requirements along with detailed software requirements, making it difficult to find two systems with the same requirements that could share the same machine.
Through the use of virtualization, computers can run multiple operating systems along with multiple software applications—all at the same time.

33. VIRTUALIZED COMPUTING
Data center – A facility used to house management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems
Sustainable data centers
Reduces carbon emissions
Reduces required floor Space
Chooses Geographic location
If we take a holistic and integrated approach to overall company growth, the benefits of integrating information MIS infrastructures, environnemental MIS infrastructures, and sustainable MIS infrastructures become obvious.
For example, a company could easily create a backup of its software and important information in one or more geographically dispersed locations using cloud computing.
This would be far cheaper than building its own hot and cold sites in different areas of the country.
In the case of a security breach, failover can be deployed as a virtual machine in one location of the cloud can be shut down as another virtual machine in a different location on the cloud comes online.

34. LEARNING OUTCOME REVIEW
Now that you have finished the chapter please review the learning outcomes in your text
Be sure to review the learning outcomes included in the end-of-chapter material