Tuesday, 30th October 2018 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies

Tuesday, 30th October 2018 IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies

Hello back again with me to the class's lesson.
First of all, 

What is information technology (IT) infrastructure, and what are its components?

IT infrastructure is the shared technology resources that provide the platform for the firm’s specific information system applications. IT infrastructure includes hardware, software, and services that are shared across the entire firm. Major IT infrastructure components include computer hardware platforms, operating system platforms, enterprise software platforms, networking and telecommunications platforms, database management software, Internet platforms, and consulting services and systems integrators.

IT infrastructure consists of a set of physical devices and software applications that are required to operate entire enterprises. But IT infrastructure is also a set of firm wide services budgeted by management and comprising of both human and technical capabilities. These services include the following:

-Computing platform used to provide computing services that connect employees, customers and suppliers into a coherent digital environment, including large mainframes, desktop, and laptop computers, and personal digital assistance and internal appliances.

-IT management services that plan and develop the infrastructure, coordinate with the business units for IT services, manage accounting for the IT expenditure, and provide project management services.

-IT standard services that provide the firm and its business units with policy to determine when, how and which information technology will be used.

-IT education services which provide training in system use to employees and offer managerial training on how to plan for and manage IT investment.

-IT research and development services that provide the firm with research on potential future IT project and investments that could help the firm differentiate itself in the market place.

This service platform perspective makes it easier to understand the business value provided by infrastructure investment. For instance, in the US, the real business value of a fully loaded personal computer operating at 3 gigahertz that costs about $ 1000 or a high speed internet connection is hard to understand without knowing who will use it and how it will be used.

Stages and technology drivers of IT infrastructure evolution

Technology drivers of IT infrastructure evaluation

The changes in IT infrastructure describes the result in development of computer processing, memory chips, storage devices, telecommunication and networking hardware and software design that have exponentially increased computing power while reducing costs.

The term hardware, software and firmware occur frequently in any literature concerned with computer. It is important at the outset to have some understanding of their meanings.

1. Hardware:

-Physical components in computer circuits, keyboards, disk drivers, disk and printers are all examples of pieces of hardware.

-Software is a set of instructions, written in specialized language, the execution of which controls the operation of the computer programmes.

2, Firmware

-Is the permanent storage of programme instruction in hardware. It is usually used to refer to a set of instructions that is permanently encoded on micro-chips.

-The term firmware is used because it is the inseparable combination of hardware and software.

List each of the eras in IT infrastructure evolution and describe its distinguishing characteristics.

Five stages of IT infrastructure evolution include:

-General-purpose mainframe and minicomputer era (1959 to present):

-Personal computer era (1981 to present):

-Client/server era (1983 to present):

-Enterprise computing era (1992 to present):

-Evaluation of infrastructure

The IT infrastructure in organisations today is an outgrowth of over fifty years of evolution in computing plate forms. There have been five stages in this evolution, each representing a different configuration of computing power and infrastructure elements. The five eras are general purpose mainframe and minicomputer computing, personal computer, client/server networks, enterprise computing and cloud computing.

Describe the evolving mobile platform, grid computing, and cloud computing.

Mobile platform: more and more business computing is moving from PCs and desktop machines to mobile devices like cell phones and smart phones. Data transmissions, Web surfing, e-mail and instant messaging, digital content displays, and data exchanges with internal corporate systems are all available through a mobile digital platform. Net books, small low-cost lightweight subnotebooks that are optimized for wireless communication and Internet access, are included.

The emerging mobile digital platform

As computing increasingly take place over the network, new mobile digital computing platform has emerging communication devices such as cell phone and smart phone, the blackberry and iphone, taking on many functions of hand held computers, including transmission of data, surfing the web, transmitting email and instant messages, displaying digital content, and exchanging data with internal cooperated system. The new mobile platform also includes small low cost light weight sub note books called net books optimized for wireless communication and internet access, with core computing function such as a word processing, and digital e book readers such as amazon, kindle with some web access capabilities. More and more business computing is moving from PCs and desktop machines to these mobile devices; managers are increasingly using these devices to coordinate work and communicate with employees.

GRID computing

Grid computing: connects geographically remote computers into a single network to create a “virtual supercomputer” by combining the computational power of all computers on the grid. Grid computing takes advantage of the fact that most computers in the United States use their central processing units on average only 25% of the time for the work they have been assigned, leaving these idle resources available for other processing tasks. Grid computing was impossible until high speed internet connection enabled forms to connect remote machines economically and move enormous quantities of data.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing: a model of computing where firms and individuals obtain computing power and software applications over the Internet, rather than purchasing their own hardware and software. Data are stored on powerful servers in massive data centres, and can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection and standard Web browser.