BUS 516

Computer Information Systems

IT Infrastructure and
Emerging Technologies
 What is IT Infrastructure?

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

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What is IT Infrastructure?

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IT Infrastructure Ecosystem
Computer
Hardware

Consultants Operating
& System Systems
Integrators Platforms

IT
Infrastructure
Ecosystem
Enterprise
Internet
Software
Platforms
Applications

Data Networking /
Management Tele-
& Storage communications

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 Components of IT Infrastructure

Hardware
Platforms

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 Components of IT Infrastructure

UNIX®

Operating
System
Platforms

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Components of IT Infrastructure

Enterprise
Software
Applications

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 Components of IT Infrastructure

Data
Management
& Storage

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Components of IT Infrastructure

For large enterprise

UNIX® networks

Networking
Platforms
For LAN

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 Components of IT Infrastructure

Internet
Platforms

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Components of IT Infrastructure

Consulting
& System
Integration
Services

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 Components of IT Infrastructure
Components Examples
Computer Hardware Platforms Mainframes, servers, PCs, tablets, smartphones

Operating System Platforms Unix, Linux, Windows, Chrome OS, Android, iOS

Enterprise Software Applications ERP, SCM, CRM, KMS

Data Management and Storage DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Hadoop

Networking/Telecommunications Windows (for LAN), UNIX (for Large enterprise-wide

Platforms network)
Internet Platforms Overlaps and must relate to a firm’s general
infrastructure; Web hosting service, routers, cabling
or wireless equipments
Consulting and System Integration of new software with legacy systems*
Integration Services

*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.

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution
Moore’s Law

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the director of Fairchild

Semiconductor’s Research and Development Laboratories,
wrote in Electronics magazine that since the first
microprocessor chip was introduced in 1959, the number of
components on a chip with the smallest manufacturing costs
per component (generally transistors) had doubled each year.

This assertion became the foundation of Moore’s Law.

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution
Within the next five years or so, chip makers may reach the physical
limits of semiconductor size. At that point they may need to use
alternatives to fashioning chips from silicon or finding other ways
to make computers more powerful ( Markoff, 2016 ).

Chip manufacturers can shrink the size of transistors down to the width
of several atoms by using nanotechnology. Nanotechnology uses
individual atoms and molecules to create computer chips and other
devices that are thousands of times smaller than current technologies
permit. Chip manufacturers are trying to develop a manufacturing
process to produce nanotube processors economically. Stanford
University scientists have built a nanotube computer.

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Technology Drivers of Infrastructure Evolution

The law of mass digital storage

The amount of digital

information is roughly
doubling every year

But the good news is the

cost of storing digital
information is falling
at an exponential rate
of 100% a year

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution
Metcalfe’s Law and Network Economics

As the number of members in a network grows linearly, the

value of the entire system grows exponentially and continues to
grow forever as members increase

Increasing returns to scale

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution
Declining communication costs and Internet

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 Technology Drivers of
Infrastructure Evolution
Standards and Network Effects

Today’s enterprise infrastructure and Internet computing would be

impossible—both now and in the future—without agreements among
manufacturers and widespread consumer acceptance of technology
standards .

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 Information Systems Trends
Mobile platforms
Virtualization Current hardware trends
Cloud computing
Green IT

Open source software

Software outsourcing and cloud services Current software
Mashups and apps trends

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Mobile Digital Platform

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Consumerization of IT and BYOD

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 Virtualization
Virtualization enables a single physical resource (such as a
server or a storage device) to appear to the user as multiple
logical resources

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

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 Virtualization

Server virtualization is a common method of reducing technology

costs by providing the ability to host multiple systems on a single
physical machine.
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 Virtualization

Typical Server
Utilization Rate 15% - 20%

Server Utilization
Rate after
70% or
Virtualization higher
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 Virtualization

Higher utilization rates translate into –

fewer computers required to process the same

amount of work,

reduced data center space to house machines, and

lower energy usage

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 Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a model of computing in which computer
processing, storage, software, and other services are provided
as a shared pool of virtualized resources over a network,
primarily the Internet.

It is similar to electricity—a utility

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 Cloud Computing
Essential Characteristics

On-demand self-service Ubiquitous network access

Location-independent resource pooling

Rapid elasticity

Measured service

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Cloud Computing

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 Cloud Computing
Cloud computing consists of 3 different types of services:

Cloud infrastructure as a service: Customers use processing, storage,

networking, and other computing resources from cloud service
providers to run their information systems.

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

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Cloud Computing

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 Cloud Computing
Cloud platform as a service: Customers use infrastructure and
programming tools supported by the cloud service provider to develop
their own applications.

IBM offers a Bluemix service for Salesforce.com’s Force.com,

software development and testing which allows developers to build
on the IBM Cloud. applications that are hosted on its
servers as a service.

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 Cloud Computing
Cloud software as a service: Customers use software hosted by
the vendor on the vendor’s cloud infrastructure and delivered
over a network.

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 Cloud Computing

A cloud can be private or public.

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 organization. It may be

managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on
premise or off premise.

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 Cloud Computing
Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Everyone?

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Cloud Computing

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 Cloud Computing
Drawbacks of Cloud Computing

Some companies worry about the security risks related to

entrusting their critical data and systems to an outside vendor
that also works with other companies.

Companies expect their systems to be available 24/7 and do

not want to suffer any loss of business capability if cloud
infrastructures malfunction.

Users become dependent on the cloud computing provider

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 Green Computing / Green IT

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 minimize impact
on the environment.

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Green Computing / Green IT

Energy use by
world’s data center
is equivalent to
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1.5% of all
energy use

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Green Computing / Green IT
A corporate data center can easily consume over 100
times more power than a standard office building.

Green hardware

Green software

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Green Computing / Green IT
E-waste management

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 Open Source Software
Open source software is often confused with free software—as in free
of charge. In fact, licenses for open source software may or may not
be offered at no cost (free of charge software is called freeware).
Rather, the term open source is used to differentiate it from closed
source, or proprietary, programs that prevent users from accessing
and modifying the source code.

Software programs are created by software engineers, who design

the algorithm, and programmers, who code it using a specific
programming language. The code generated by the programmers,
which can be understood by anyone who is well versed in the
programming language used, is called the source code.

In order for the program to work, the source code has to be

transformed (i.e., interpreted or compiled) into a format that a
computer can execute, called the object code.

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 Open Source Software
Typically, when we purchase a software license from a software
company (e.g., Microsoft Office), we are given the object code and
the right to run it on our computers, but we are not provided with the
source code.

In fact, any effort to reverse engineer the object code to gain access
to the source code is considered a violation of the intellectual
property of the software house and will land us into a lawsuit.

Unlike proprietary software, open source programs are distributed

with the express intent of enabling users to gain access to the source
code and modify it.

Linux (operating system), Apache (Web server), and MySQL

(database management system)

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Open Source Software

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Open Source Software

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

Software Packages and Enterprise Software

A software package is a prewritten commercially available set of

software programs that eliminates the need for a firm to write its
own software programs for certain functions, such as payroll
processing or order handling.

Large-scale enterprise software systems provide a single,

integrated, worldwide software system for firms at a cost much less
than they would pay if they developed it themselves.

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

Software Outsourcing

Software outsourcing enables a firm to contract custom software

development or maintenance of existing legacy programs to
outside firms, which often operate offshore in low-wage areas of the
world.

However, as wages offshore rise, and the costs of managing

offshore projects are factored in, some work that would have been
sent offshore is returning to domestic companies.

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

Online Work Opportunities

(Source: Online Labor Index – University of Oxford)

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

The Online Labour Index, by country

Oxford Internet Institute
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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a service is a software delivery approach in which a

provider hosts the application in its data centers and the customer
accesses the needed functionalities over a computer network.

Thus, instead of licensing the

application and requiring that
the customer installs it,
maintains it, and generally
supports it, in the SaaS model
it is the provider who performs
these tasks.

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

Software as a Service (SaaS)

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services
Mashups

The software that are used for both personal and business tasks may
consist of large self-contained programs, or it may be composed of
interchangeable components that integrate freely with other
applications on the Internet.

Individual users and entire companies mix and match these software
components to create their own customized applications and to share
information with others. The resulting software applications are called
mashups.

You have performed a mashup if you’ve ever personalized your

Facebook profile or your blog with a capability to display videos or
slide shows.

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Software Outsourcing and Cloud Services
Apps

Apps are small pieces of software that run on the Internet, on your
computer, or on your mobile phone or tablet and are generally
delivered over the Internet.

Most Apps provide a non browser pathway for users to experience

the Web and perform a number of tasks, ranging from reading
newspapers, searching and buying.

Apps tie the customer to a specific hardware platform: As the user

adds more and more apps to his or her mobile phone, the cost of
switching to a competing mobile platform rises

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How to handle infrastructure change?

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 Scalability

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

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Who controls IT infrastructure?
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?

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Infrastructure Investments

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