What is an agile mis infrastructure

5 CHAPTER

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

CHAPTER OUTLINE

SECTION 5.1 MIS Infrastructures

SECTION 5.2 Building Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

The Business Benefits of a Solid MIS Infrastructure

Supporting Operations: Information MIS Infrastructure

Supporting Change: Agile MIS Infrastructure

MIS and the Environment

Supporting the Environment: Sustainable MIS Infrastructure

What’s in IT for me?

Why do you, as a business student, need to understand the underlying technology of any company? Most people think “that technical stuff” is something they will never personally encounter and for that reason do not need to know anything about MIS infrastructures. Well, those people will be challenged in the business world. When your database fails and you lose all of your sales history, you will personally feel the impact when you don’t receive your bonus. When your computer crashes and you lose all of your confidential information, not to mention your emails, calendars, and messages, then you will understand why everyone needs to learn about MIS infrastructures. You never want to leave the critical task of backing up your data to your MIS department. You want to ensure personally that your information is not only backed up but also safeguarded and recoverable. For these reasons, business professionals in the 21st century need to acquire a base-level appreciation of what MIS can and cannot do for their company. Understanding how MIS supports growth, operations, profitability, and most recently, sustainability, is crucial whether one is new to the workforce or a seasoned Fortune 500 employee. One of the primary goals of this chapter is to create a more level playing field between you as a business professional and the MIS specialists with whom you will work. After reading it, you should have many of the skills you need to assist in analyzing current and even some future MIS infrastructures; in recommending needed changes in processes; and in evaluating alternatives that support a company’s growth, operations, and profits.

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opening case study

Box Up Your Data

What happens when you need a file for a class that you have on your desktop back at home? What happens when you want to share your wedding video with your friends and family around the world? What happens when you want to safeguard the 4,000 selfies you have taken over the past year? Your best bet is to store your data in a Box! Box offers data storage services that: Help you securely store, share, and manage your files.

Store unlimited data at the start.

Securely send large files online.

Take advantage of comprehensive security for mobile devices.

Easily collaborate online with anyone, anywhere.

Control who can access content.

Edit documents and files online.

Box is a cloud data-sharing service that can increase your productivity by making it easy to create and collaborate with co-workers by using computers, iPhones, iPads, Androids, or other devices. With a Box site, you can access up to 50GB of files from anywhere. Through a web link, you can invite others to share your files or collaborate on your documents, and you can synchronize files from Box to your desktop and vice versa.

Another College Start-Up Box

Rachel King from InfoWorld interviewed Box founder Aaron Levie on how he and his childhood friends started the company. Box as a platform and company was born in 2005, but even that was well after the establishment of the friendship between Levie and his cofounder and Box’s chief financial officer, Dylan Smith. Smith and Levie met as classmates at Islander Middle School on Mercer Island, Washington, a suburb southeast of Seattle, and then went to Mercer Island High School together. “Even back then he started getting me interested in entrepreneurship,” Smith recalled. “He was much more interested in technology [than business] back then.” Two other key members of the Box team were also childhood friends.

Jeff Queisser, currently vice president of Box’s technical operations, met Levie when they were in the fourth and fifth grades, respectively, as neighbors. By high school, Queisser recalled that the two were starting “kinda crazy businesses.” “[Levie] was a magician, and I was very much a hard core nerd and doing programming,” Queisser laughed.

Sam Ghods, now vice president of technology at Box, joined the group in the tenth grade when his family relocated from Illinois to Mercer Island. The same year in school, Ghods recalled that he and Queisser became friends on the bus to school, eventually hanging out more frequently with Smith and Levie as well and getting involved in various business schemes.

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In high school, Levie’s parents’ hot tub served as the discussion forum. “We would get a call at about 12:30, and it would be Aaron, ‘What do you think about this? I think this could be absolutely insane. Like, come over right now. I got towels, just bring shorts, come over,’” Queisser remembers. “This would be at 12:30 and by like 12:40, we were in his hot tub just iterating ideas.”

And although he built a lot of websites in high school, Levie doesn’t brag about having a strong technical background, admitting, “They weren’t very good websites.” One example was a search engine dubbed Zizap, which Levie facetiously peddled as “the world’s fastest search engine if you have never been to Google.” Another project was Fastest.com , a website that let people buy and sell their homes online. Levie notes sarcastically that it “made sense as a high school senior to launch that company.”

These early rumblings of entrepreneurship would soon pay dividends. Levie enrolled at the University of Southern California in 2003 to study business, which is where the idea that was to become Box began to develop. “It’s not like a lightning bolt that hits you in the head, and all of a sudden you just get so obsessed with storing files online. It was a series of factors,” he explained.

The first piece of the puzzle came from the basic difficulty of getting work done. He and his fellow students were working from lots of computers, collaborating on projects, and accessing files from different places, including libraries, classrooms, and dorm rooms.

“It felt unbelievably kind of painful and taxing to share data across those different systems and with other people. It seemed like there should be a simpler solution,” Levie remarked.

A business school project in which students were asked to evaluate a particular industry added another piece to the puzzle. Levie chose the nascent online storage industry and wrote a paper on flaws with existing businesses in the market and what one could do to build a better business effectively. It didn’t take long before he realized the massive potential. “It was very obvious that there should be a technology category that solved this problem,” he said.

“When we were talking about just the things that we were doing and the stuff we were working on, Box came up,” Levie described. “It’s very, very early in the process, and Dylan Smith decided to join on board as the other half of the business and product side. He handled the finance and some of the early marketing stuff. That was how we started.” 1

Market Competition

The storage market is increasing as the price and density of storage drops about every 18 months, making it cheaper to offer free storage from big companies that can absorb the costs, such as Apple and Google. There are a number of companies competing in the cloud storage arena, as compared in Figure 5.1 .

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FIGURE 5.1

Test Center Scorecard

Source: www.inforworld.com

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section 5.1

MIS Infrastructures

LEARNING OUTCOMES

5.1Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.

5.2Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.

5.3Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.

THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF A SOLID MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

LO 5.1: Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.

Management information systems have played a significant role in business strategies, affected business decisions and processes, and even changed the way companies operate. What is the foundation supporting all of these systems that enable business growth, operations, and profits? What supports the volume and complexity of today’s user and application requirements? What protects systems from failures and crashes? It is the 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.

Briefly defined, hardware consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system, and software is the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks. In today’s business environment, most hardware and software is run via a network. A network is a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate. As more companies need to share more information, the network takes on greater importance in the infrastructure. Most companies use a specific form of network infrastructure called a client and server network. 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). Anyone not familiar with the basics of hardware, software, or networks should review Appendix A , “Hardware and Software Basics,” and Appendix B , “Networks and Telecommunications,” for more information.

In the physical world, a detailed blueprint would show how public utilities, such as water, electricity, and gas, support the foundation of a building. MIS infrastructure is similar because it shows in detail how the hardware, software, and network connectivity support the firm’s processes. Every company, regardless of size, relies on some form of MIS infrastructure, whether it is a few networked personal computers sharing an Excel file or a large multinational company with thousands of employees interconnected around the world.

An MIS infrastructure is dynamic; it continually changes as the business needs change. Each time a new form of Internet-enabled device, such as an iPhone or BlackBerry, is created and made available to the public, a firm’s MIS infrastructure must be revised to support the device. This moves beyond just innovations in hardware to include new types of software and network connectivity. 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. Figure 5.2 displays the three primary areas on which enterprise architects focus when maintaining a firm’s 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.

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FIGURE 5.2

MIS Infrastructures

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.

SUPPORTING OPERATIONS: INFORMATION MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

LO 5.2: Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.

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, emails, 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.

An information MIS infrastructure identifies where and how important information is maintained and secured. An information infrastructure supports day-to-day business operations and plans for emergencies such as power outages, floods, earthquakes, malicious attacks via the Internet, theft, and security breaches to name just a few. Managers must take every precaution to make sure their systems are operational and protected around the clock every day of the year. Losing a laptop or experiencing bad weather in one part of the country simply cannot take down systems required to operate core business processes. In the past, someone stealing company information would have to carry out boxes upon boxes of paper. Today, as data storage technologies grow in capabilities while shrinking in size, a person can simply walk out the front door of the building with the company’s data files stored on a thumb drive or external hard drive. Today’s managers must act responsibly to protect one of their most valued assets, information. To support continuous business operations, an information infrastructure provides three primary elements:

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FIGURE 5.3

Areas of Support Provided by Information Infrastructure

Backup and recovery plan

Disaster recovery plan

Business continuity plan (see Figure 5.3 )

Backup and Recovery Plan

Each year businesses lose time and money because of system crashes and failures. One way to minimize the damage of a system crash is to have a backup and recovery strategy in place. 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. Many types of backup and recovery media are available, including maintaining an identical replica or redundant copy of the storage server, external hard drives, thumb drives, and even DVDs. The primary differences between them are speed and cost.

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. Fault tolerance is an expensive form of backup, and only mission-critical applications and operations use it. 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.

Using DVDs or thumb drives to store your data offers a low-speed and low-cost backup method. It is a good business practice to back up data at least once a week using a low-cost method. This will alleviate the pain of having your laptop stolen or your system crash because you will still have access to your data, and it will only be a few days old.

Deciding how often to back up information and what media to use is a critical decision. Companies should choose a backup and recovery strategy in line with their goals and operational needs. 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 information, 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. If this risk is acceptable, a weekly backup strategy will work. If it is unacceptable, the company needs more frequent backup.

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Creating Your BCP Plan

Business disruption costs money. In the event of a disaster or emergency, you will not only lose revenue, you will also incur additional expenses. If you are expecting your insurance to cover your losses, be careful—there are many losses your insurance will not cover such as lost sales, lost business intelligence, and lost customers. To mitigate the risks of a catastrophe, you will want to create a detailed business continuity plan. A business continuity plan (BCP) is not only a good idea but also one of the least expensive plans a company can develop. A BCP will detail how employees will contact each other and continue to keep operations functioning in the event of a disaster or emergency such as a fire or flood. Regrettably, many companies never take the time to develop such a plan until it is too late.

Research the web for sample BCP plans for a small business or a start-up. In a group, create a BCP for a start-up of your choice. Be sure to think of such things as data storage, data access, transaction processing, employee safety, and customer communications.

Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters such as power outages, fires, floods, hurricanes, and even malicious activities such as hackers and viruses strike companies every day. Disasters can have the following effects on companies and their business operations.

Disrupting communications: Most companies depend on voice and data communications for daily operational needs. Widespread communications outages, from either direct damage to the infrastructure or sudden spikes in usage related to an outside disaster, can be as devastating to some firms as shutting down the whole business.

Damaging physical infrastructures: Fire and flood can directly damage buildings, equipment, and systems, making structures unsafe and systems unusable. Law enforcement officers and firefighters may prohibit business professionals from entering a building, thereby restricting access to retrieve documents or equipment.

Halting transportation: Disasters such as floods and hurricanes can have a deep effect on transportation. Disruption to major highways, roads, bridges, railroads, and airports can prevent business professionals from reporting to work or going home, slow the delivery of supplies, and stop the shipment of products.

Blocking utilities: Public utilities, such as the supply of electric power, water, and natural gas, can be interrupted for hours or days even in incidents that cause no direct damage to the physical infrastructure. Buildings are often uninhabitable and systems unable to function without public utilities.

These effects can devastate companies by causing them to cease operations for hours, days, or longer and risk losing customers whom they cannot then supply. Therefore, to combat these disasters, a company can create 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 company might strategically maintain operations in New York and San Francisco, ensuring that a natural disaster would not have an impact on both locations. A disaster recovery plan also foresees the possibility that not only the computer equipment but also the building where employees work may be destroyed. 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. Figure 5.4 outlines these resources that support disaster recovery.

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FIGURE 5.4

Sites to Support Disaster Recovery

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. Figure 5.5 displays a disaster recovery cost curve and shows that the best recovery plan in terms of cost and time is where the two lines intersect. Creating such a curve is no small task. Managers must consider the cost of losing information and technology within each department or functional area and across the whole company. During the first few hours of a disaster, those costs may be low, but they rise over time. With those costs in hand, a company must then determine the costs of recovery. Figure 5.6 displays TechTarget’s disaster recovery strategies for business.

On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was rocked by an earthquake that destroyed large sections of the city and claimed the lives of more than 3,000 inhabitants. More than a century later, a rebuilt and more durable San Francisco serves as a central location for major MIS corporations as well as a major world financial center. Managers of these corporations are well aware of the potential disasters that exist along the San Andreas Fault and actively update their business continuity plans anticipating such issues as earthquakes and floods. The Union Bank of California is located in the heart of downtown San Francisco and maintains a highly detailed and well-developed business continuity plan. The company employs hundreds of business professionals scattered around the world that coordinate plans for addressing the potential loss of a facility, business professionals, or critical systems so that the company can continue to operate if a disaster happens. Its disaster recovery plan includes hot sites where staff can walk in and start working exactly as if they were in their normal location. It would be a matter of minutes, not hours, for the Union Bank of California to be up and running again in the event of a disaster. 2

FIGURE 5.5

Disaster Recovery Cost Curve

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FIGURE 5.6

TechTarget’s Disaster Recovery Strategies

Business Continuity Plan

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. Natural disasters and terrorist attacks are on the minds of business professionals who take safeguarding their information assets seriously. Disaster recovery plans typically focus on systems and data, ignoring cross-functional and intraorganizational business processes that can be destroyed during an emergency. For this reason many companies are turning to a more comprehensive and all-encompassing emergency preparedness plan known as 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 (see Figure 5.7 ). 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? The business impact analysis is a key part of BCP because it details the order in which functional areas should be restored, ensuring that the most critical are focused on first.

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. Emergency notification services can be deployed through the firm’s own infrastructure, supplied by an outside service provider on company premises, or hosted remotely by an outside service provider. All three methods provide notification using a variety of methods such as email, voice notification to a cell phone, and text messaging. The notifications can be sent to all the devices selected, providing multiple means in which to get critical information to those who need it.

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FIGURE 5.7

TechTarget’s Business Continuity Strategies

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 interruption 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). If one of these four vital components is not functioning, the entire system will be unavailable, shutting down cross-functional business processes such as order management and payroll. Figure 5.8 displays the key areas a company should focus on when developing technology recovery strategies.

SUPPORTING CHANGE: AGILE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

LO 5.3: Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.

Agile MIS infrastructure includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals. If a company grows by 50 percent in a single year, its infrastructure and systems must be able to handle a 50 percent growth rate. If they cannot, they can severely hinder the company’s ability not only to grow but also to function.

The future of a company depends on its ability to meet its partners, suppliers, and customers any time of the day in any geographic location. Imagine owning an ebusiness and everyone on the Internet is tweeting and collaborating about how great your business idea is and how successful your company is going to be. Suddenly, you have 5 million global customers interested in your website. Unfortunately, you did not anticipate this many customers so quickly, and the system crashes. Users typing in your URL find a blank message stating the website is unavailable and to try back soon. Or even worse, they can get to your website but it takes three minutes to reload each time they click a button. The buzz soon dies about your business idea as some innovative web-savvy fast follower quickly copies your idea and creates a website that can handle the massive number of customers. The characteristics of agile MIS infrastructures can help ensure that your systems can meet and perform under any unexpected or unplanned changes. Figure 5.9 lists the seven abilities of an agile infrastructure.

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Disaster Recovery

Backup and recovery are essential for any computer system. How painful would it be if someone stole your laptop right now? How much critical information would you lose? How many hours would it take you to re-create your data? Perhaps that will motivate you to implement a backup procedure. How many of you have a disaster recovery plan? Disaster recovery is needed when your best friend dumps a grande latte on your computer or you accidently wash your thumb drive.

Disaster recovery plans are crucial for any business, and you should ensure that your company has everything it needs to continue operations if there is ever a disaster, such as 9/11. You need to decide which disasters are worth worrying about and which ones probably will never occur. For example, if you live in Colorado, chances are good you don’t have to worry about hurricanes, but avalanches are another story.

How often does a company need to back up its data? Where should the backup be stored? What types of disasters should companies in your state prepare for in case of an emergency? Why is it important to test the backup? What could happen to a company if it failed to create a disaster recovery plan?

FIGURE 5.8

Key Areas of Technology Recovery Strategies

Accessibility

Accessibility refers to the varying levels that define what a user can access, view, or perform when operating a system. Imagine the people at your college accessing the main student information system. Each person who accesses the system will have different needs and requirements; for example, a payroll employee will need to access vacation information and salary information, or a student will need to access course information and billing information. Each system user is provided with an access level that details which parts of the system the user can and cannot access and what the user can do when in the system. For example, you would not want your students to be able to view payroll information or a professor’s personal information; also, some users can only view information and are not allowed to create or delete information. Top-level MIS employees require administrator access , or unrestricted access to the entire system. Administrator access can perform functions such as resetting passwords, deleting accounts, and shutting down entire systems.

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FIGURE 5.9

Agile MIS Infrastructure Characteristics

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C director and inventor of the World Wide Web, stated, “the power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” 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.

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. 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 is known as “five 9s” (99.999 percent) availability. Some companies have systems available around the clock to support ebusiness operations, global customers, and online suppliers.

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Sometimes systems must be taken down for maintenance, upgrades, and fixes, which are completed during downtime. One challenge with availability is determining when to schedule system downtime if the system is expected to operate continuously. Performing maintenance during the evening might seem like a great idea, but evening in one city is morning somewhere else in the world, and business professionals scattered around the globe may not be able to perform specific job functions if the systems they need are unavailable. This is where companies deploy failover systems so they can take the primary system down for maintenance and activate the secondary system to ensure continuous operations.

Maintainability

Companies must watch today’s needs, as well as tomorrow’s, when designing and building systems that support agile infrastructures. Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of company changes, environmental changes, and business changes. 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. When building your systems, you might not design them to handle multiple currencies and different languages, which might make sense if the company is not currently performing international business. Unfortunately, when the first international order arrives, which happens easily with ebusiness, the system will be unable to handle the request because it does not have the flexibility to be easily reconfigured for a new language or currency. When the company does start growing and operating overseas, the system will need to be redeveloped, which is not an easy or cheap task, to handle multiple currencies and different languages.

Building and deploying flexible systems allow easy updates, changes, and reconfigurations for unexpected business or environmental changes. Just think what might have happened if Facebook had to overhaul its entire system to handle multiple languages. Another social networking business could easily have stepped in and become the provider of choice. That certainly would not be efficient or effective for business operations.

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. 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.

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. Many argue that the information contained in Wikipedia is unreliable. Because the Wikipedia entries can be edited by any user, there are examples of rogue users inaccurately updating information. Many users skip over Google search findings that correlate to Wikipedia for this reason. Housing unreliable information on a website can put a company at risk of losing customers, placing inaccurate supplier orders, or even making unreliable business decisions. 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. Reliable systems ensure that vulnerabilities are kept at a minimum to reduce risk.

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Ranking the Ab-“ilities”

Do you know how Google makes so much money? Unlike traditional businesses, Google does not make money from the users of its service. Google makes money by charging the companies that want to appear in the sponsored section of a search result. After performing a Google search, you will notice three sections on the resulting page. Along the top and side are the sponsored search results, and the middle lists the organic search results. Google’s innovative marketing program, called AdWords, allows companies to bid on common search terms, and the highest bidder is posted first in the sponsored search results. Every time a user clicks a sponsored link, the company that owns the link has to pay Google. This is also called pay-per-click and can cost anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars for each click. A general search term such as “tropical vacation” costs less than a more specific search term such as “Hawaiian vacation.” Whichever company bids the most for the search term appears at the top of the sponsored section. Clicking the links in the organic search results does not incur any charges for the company that owns the link.

Rank the agile infrastructure ab-“ilities” for Google from most important to least important in terms of supporting Google’s MIS infrastructure and business operations. Be sure to provide the justification behind your ranking.

Scalability

Estimating company growth is a challenging task, in part because growth can occur in a number of forms—the firm can acquire new customers, new product lines, or new markets. Scalability describes how well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth. If a company grows faster than anticipated, it might experience a variety of problems, from running out of storage space to taking more time to complete transactions. Anticipating expected, and unexpected, growth is key to building scalable systems that can support that development.

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. Performance issues experienced by firms can have disastrous business impacts causing loss of customers, loss of suppliers, and even loss of help-desk employees. Most users will wait only a few seconds for a website to return a request before growing frustrated and either calling the support desk or giving up and moving on to another website.

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. Planning for increases in capacity can ensure that systems perform as expected. Waiting for a system to respond to requests is not productive.

Web 2.0 is a big driver for capacity planning to ensure that agile infrastructures can meet the business’s operational needs. Delivering videos over the Internet requires enough bandwidth to satisfy millions of users during peak periods such as Friday and Saturday evenings. Video transmissions over the Internet cannot tolerate packet loss (blocks of data loss), and allowing one additional user to access the system could degrade the video quality for every user.

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BUSINESS DRIVEN DEBATE

Laptop? Notebook? Netbook? Tablet?

Thanks to Moore’s Law, computing devices are getting smaller, cheaper, and faster every year, allowing innovative companies to create new devices that are smaller and more powerful than current devices. Just look at desktop, laptop, notebook, and tablet computers. These are all different devices allowing users to connect and compute around the globe. Moore’s Law has been accurate about computing power roughly doubling every 18 months. Do you agree or disagree that Moore’s Law will continue to apply for the next 20 years? Why or why not?

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 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. 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.

section 5.2

Building Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

LEARNING OUTCOMES

5.4Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.

5.5Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business benefits.

MIS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

LO 5.4: Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.

The general trend in MIS is toward smaller, faster, and cheaper devices. Gordon Moore, cofounder 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. His prediction that this trend would continue has come to be known as Moore’s Law , which 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.

Moore’s Law is great for many companies because they can acquire large amounts of MIS equipment for cheaper and cheaper costs. As ebusinesses continue to grow, companies equip their employees with multiple forms of electronic devices ranging from laptops to cell phones to iPads. This is great for supporting a connected corporation, but significant unintended side effects include our dependence on fossil fuels and increased need for safe disposal of outdated computing equipment. Concern about these side effects has led many companies to turn to an ecological practice known as sustainable MIS. 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. Although sustainable MIS refers to the environmental impact of computing as a whole, clean computing is specifically focused on the production of environmental waste. A green personal computer (green PC) is built using environment-friendly materials and designed to save energy. Building sustainable MIS infrastructures is a core initiative and critical success factor for socially responsible corporations. Figure 5.10 displays the three primary side effects of businesses’ expanded use of technology.

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BUSINESS DRIVEN ETHICS AND SECURITY

Ewaste and the Environment

By some estimates, there may be as many as 1 billion surplus or obsolete computers and monitors in the world. Consider California, where 6,000 computers become surplus every day. If not disposed of properly, this enormous ewaste stream, which can contain more than 1,000 toxic substances, is harmful to human beings and the environment. Beryllium is found in computer motherboards, chromium in floppy disks, lead in batteries and computer monitors, and mercury in alkaline batteries. One of the most toxic chemicals known is cadmium, found in many old laptops and computer chips.

In poorer countries, where the United States and Europe export some of their ewaste, the full impact of the environmental damage is quickly being realized. These areas have little use for obsolete electronic equipment so local recyclers resell some parts and burn the rest in illegal dumps, often near residential areas, releasing toxic and carcinogenic substances into the air, land, and water. 5

Have you ever participated in ewaste? What can you do to ensure that you are safely disposing of electronic equipment including batteries? What can governments do to encourage companies to dispose of ewaste safely? What can be done to protect poorer countries from receiving ewaste? Create a list of the ways you can safely dispose of cell phones, computers, printers, ink cartridges, MP3 players, and batteries. What could you do to inform citizens of the issues associated with ewaste and educate them on safe disposal practices?

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. 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. 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. Many companies, including public schools and universities, simply can’t afford the recycling costs. 6

Ewaste also occurs when unused equipment stored in attics, basements, and storage facilities never reaches a recycling center. Retrieving the silver, gold, and other valuable metals from these devices is more efficient and less environmentally harmful than removing it from its natural environment.

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FIGURE 5.10

Three Pressures Driving Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

Currently, less than 20 percent of ewaste in the United States is recycled; however, even recycling does not guarantee that the equipment is disposed of safely. Although some recyclers process the material ethically, others ship it to countries such as China and India, where environmental enforcement is weak. This action poses its own global environmental problems.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 7

SUPPORTING THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

LO 5.5: Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business benefits.

Combating ewaste, energy consumption, and carbon emissions requires a firm to focus on creating sustainable MIS infrastructures. A sustainable MIS infrastructure identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption. The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure are displayed in Figure 5.11 .

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BUSINESS DRIVEN DISCUSSION

How Big Is Your Carbon Footprint?

Inevitably, in going about our daily lives—commuting, sheltering our families, eating—each of us contributes to the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. Yet, there are many things each of us, as individuals, can do to reduce our carbon emissions. The choices we make in our homes, our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and throw away all influence our carbon footprint and can help ensure a stable climate for future generations. 9

The Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator measures your impact on our climate. Its carbon footprint calculator estimates how many tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases your choices create each year. Visit the Nature Conservancy’s carbon footprint calculator to determine your carbon footprint and what you can do to reduce your emissions ( http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator/ ).

FIGURE 5.11

Sustainable MIS Infrastructure Components

Grid Computing

When a light is turned on, the power grid delivers exactly what is needed, instantly. Computers and networks can now work that way using grid computing. Grid computing is 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. Grid computing makes better use of MIS resources, allowing greater scalability because systems can easily grow to handle peaks and valleys in demand, become more cost efficient, and solve problems that would be impossible to tackle with a single computer (see Figure 5.12 ). 8

The uses of grid computing are numerous, including the creative environment of animated movies. DreamWorks Animation used grid computing to complete many of its hit films, including Antz, Shrek, Madagascar, and How to Train Your Dragon. The third Shrek film required more than 20 million computer hours to make (compared to 5 million for the first Shrek and 10 million for the second). At peak production times, DreamWorks dedicated more than 4,000 computers to its Shrek grid, allowing it to complete scenes in days and hours instead of months. With the increased grid computing power, the DreamWork’s animators were able to add more realistic movement to water, fire, and magic scenes (see Figure 5.13 ). With grid computing, a company can work faster or more efficiently, providing a potential competitive advantage and additional cost savings. 10

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FIGURE 5.12

Grid Computing Example

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. Residents of Boulder, Colorado, can monitor their use of electricity and control appliances remotely due to the city’s large-scale smart grid system. Xcel Energy has installed 21,000 smart grid meters since the $100 million program started several years ago. Energy use by early adopters is down as much as 45 percent. 11

FIGURE 5.13

Making Shrek 2 with Grid Computing

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Virtualized Computing

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 that 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. 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. Virtualization is essentially a form of consolidation that can benefit sustainable MIS infrastructures in a variety of ways, for example:

By increasing availability of applications that can give a higher level of performance, depending on the hardware used.

By increasing energy efficiency by requiring less hardware to run multiple systems or applications.

By increasing hardware usability by running multiple operating systems on a single computer.

Originally, computers were designed to run a single application on a single operating system. This left most computers vastly underutilized. (As mentioned earlier, 75 percent of most computing power is available for other tasks.) Virtualization allows multiple virtual computers to exist on a single machine, which allows it to share its resources, such as memory and hard disk space, to run different applications and even different operating systems. Mac computers can run both the Apple operating system and the Windows PC operating system, with the use of virtualization software (see Figure 5.14 ). Unfortunately, virtualization, at least at the moment, is not available for a PC to run Mac software. There are three basic categories of virtualization:

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.

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. Also, by virtually separating the operating system and applications from the hardware, if there is a disaster or hardware failure, it is easy to port the virtual machine to a new physical machine, allowing a company to recovery quickly. One of the primary uses of virtualization is for performing backup, recovery, and disaster recovery. Using virtual servers or a virtualization service provider, such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, to host disaster recovery is more sustainable than a single company incurring the expense of having redundant physical systems. Also, these providers’ data centers are built to withstand natural disasters and are typically located far away from big cities.

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BUSINESS DRIVEN INNOVATION

Upcycle Your Old PCs

Imagine walking into your friend’s home and seeing her computer with live fish swimming around inside it. Upon taking a second look, you realize she has upcycled her old Mac into an innovative macquarium. Some young entrepreneurs are making a fortune by upcycling old Mac desktops as fish tanks. An upcycle reuses or refurbishes ewaste and creates a new product. With the growing problem of ewaste, one alternative is to upcycle your old technology by creating innovative household products or personal accessories. Take a look at one of the devices you are currently using to see whether you can create an upcycled product. Here are a few great ideas to get you started:

Keyboard magnets

Computer aquariums

Mac mailboxes

Keyboard calendars

Floppy disk pencil holders

Circuit board key rings

RAM key chains

Circuit earrings

Cable bracelets

Motherboard clocks

Mouse belt buckles

FIGURE 5.14

Virtualization Allows an Apple Macintosh Computer to Run OS X and Windows 7

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Virtual Data Centers A data center is a facility used to house management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Data centers, sometimes referred to as server farms, consume power and require cooling and floor space while working to support business growth without disrupting normal business operations and the quality of service. The amount of data a data center stores has grown exponentially over the years as our reliance on information increases. Backups, graphics, documents, presentations, photos, and audio and video files all contribute to the ever-expanding information footprint that requires storage. One of the most effective ways to limit the power consumption and cooling requirements of a data center is to consolidate parts of the physical infrastructure, particularly by reducing the number of physical servers through virtualization. For this reason, virtualization is having a profound impact on data centers as the sheer number of servers a company requires to operate decreases, thereby boosting growth and performance while reducing environmental impact, as shown in Figure 5.15 . Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo! have all created data centers along the Columbia River in the northwestern United States. In this area, each company can benefit from affordable land, high-speed Internet access, plentiful water for cooling, and even more important, inexpensive electricity. These factors are critical to today’s large-scale data centers, whose sheer size and power needs far surpass those of the previous generation. The Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, is larger than 10 football fields and is powered entirely by hydroelectricity, power generated from flowing water rather than from burning coal or other fossil fuel. 12

If we take a holistic and integrated approach to overall company growth, the benefits of integrating information MIS infrastructures, environmental 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 and be shut down as another virtual machine in a different location on the cloud comes online.

Cloud Computing

Imagine a cyclical business that specializes in Halloween decorations and how its sales trends and orders vary depending on the time of year. The majority of sales occur in September and October, and the remaining 10 months have relatively small sales and small system usage. The company does not want to invest in massive expensive servers that sit idle 10 months of the year just to meet its capacity spikes in September and October. The perfect solution for this company is cloud computing, which makes it easier to gain access to the computing power that was once reserved for large corporations. Small to medium-size companies no longer have to make big capital investments to access the same powerful systems that large companies run.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 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. As shown in Figure 5.16 , users connect to the cloud from their personal computers or portable devices by using a client, such as a web browser. To these individual users, the cloud appears as their personal application, device, or document. It is like storing all of your software and documents in the cloud, and all you need is a device to access the cloud. No more hard drives, software, or processing power—that is all located in the cloud, transparent to the users. Users are not physically bound to a single computer or network; they can access their programs and documents from wherever they are, whenever they need to. Just think of having your hard drive located in the sky and you can access your information and programs using any device from wherever you are. The best part is that even if your machine crashes, is lost, or is stolen, the information hosted in the cloud is safe and always available. (See Figure 5.17 for cloud providers and Figure 5.18 for cloud computing advantages.)

FIGURE 5.15

Ways for Data Centers to Become Sustainable

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BUSINESS DRIVEN GLOBALIZATION

Solving the Ewaste Problem (StEP)

The United States disposes of more than 384 million units of ewaste yearly and currently recycles less than 20 percent, according to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition. The remaining 80 percent is burned or dumped in landfills, leaking toxic substances such as mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, and beryllium into the environment. Reports predict that ewaste will weigh as much as 200 Empire State Buildings by 2017. Solving the Ewaste Problem (StEP) Initiative is a group represented by the United Nations organizations, governments, and science organizations, and their mission is to ensure safe and responsible ewaste disposal. StEP predicts ewaste will grow by a third in the next five years with the United States and China being the biggest contributors. Until recently, comprehensive data on global ewaste has been hard to collect because the definition of ewaste differs among countries. For example, the United States only includes consumer electronics such as TVs and computers, whereas Europe includes everything that has a battery or power cord in the ewaste category. 13

The growth of ewaste is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Research the web and find examples of schools around the country that are responsibly tackling the ewaste problem. In a group, create a plan for implementing an ewaste recycling program at your school.

FIGURE 5.16

Cloud Computing Example

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FIGURE 5.17

Overview of Cloud Providers

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. With a multi-tenancy cloud approach, the service provider only has one place to update its system. With a single-tenancy cloud approach, the service provider would have to update its system in every company where the software was running. The cloud fabric is the software that makes possible the benefits of cloud computing, such as multi-tenancy. A cloud fabric controller is an individual who monitors and provisions cloud resources, similar to a server administrator at an individual company. Cloud fabric controllers provision resources, balance loads, manage servers, update systems, and ensure that all environments are available and operating correctly. Cloud fabric is the primary reason cloud computing promotes all of the seven abilities, allowing a business to make its data and applications accessible, available, maintainable, portable, reliable, scalable, and usable. Figure 5.19 displays the top business cloud applications. 14

FIGURE 5.18

Cloud Computing Advantages

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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. No more worries that you don’t have enough memory to run a new program because the hardware is provided in the cloud, along with the software. You simply pay to access the program. Think of this the same way you do your telephone service. You simply pay to access a vendor’s service, and you do not have to pay for the equipment required to carry the call around the globe. You also don’t have to worry about scalability because the system automatically handles peak loads, which can be spread out among the systems in the cloud. Figure 5.20 displays the characteristics of cloud computing.

FIGURE 5.19

Top Cloud-Based Business Applications

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FIGURE 5.20

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

Because additional cloud resources are always available, companies no longer have to purchase systems for infrequent computing tasks that need intense processing power, such as preparing tax returns during tax season or increased sales transactions during certain holiday seasons. If a company needs more processing power, it is always there in the cloud—and available on a cost-efficient basis. Heroku is the leading cloud platform for building and deploying social and mobile customer applications. Built on open standards, Heroku supports multiple open frameworks, languages, and databases.

With cloud computing, individuals or businesses pay 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. Many cloud computing service providers use utility computing cloud infrastructures, which are detailed in Figure 5.21 .

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 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. With IaaS, the customer rents the hardware and provides its own custom applications or programs. IaaS customers save money by not having to spend a large amount of capital purchasing expensive servers, which is a great business advantage considering some servers cost more than $100,000. The service is typically paid for on a usage basis, much like a basic utility service such as electricity or gas. IaaS offers a cost-effective solution for companies that need their computing resources to grow and shrink as business demand changes. This is known as dynamic scaling , which means the MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers backup services that use cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by disaster. It gives an organization a total system backup that allows for business continuity in the event of system failure. DRaaS is typically part of a disaster recovery plan or business continuity plan.

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FIGURE 5.21

Cloud Service Delivery Models

Currently the most popular IaaS operation is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, generally known as Amazon EC2, or simply EC2. EC2 provides a web interface through which customers can load and run their own applications on Amazon’s computers. Customers control their own operating environment, so they can create, run, and stop services as needed, which is why Amazon describes EC2 as elastic. IaaS is a perfect fit for companies with research-intensive projects that need to process large amounts of information at irregular intervals, such as those in the scientific or medical fields. Cloud computing services offer these companies considerable cost savings because they can perform testing and analysis at levels that are not possible without access to additional and very costly computing infrastructure.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers applications over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model. Before its introduction, companies often spent huge amounts of money implementing and customizing specialized applications to satisfy their business requirements. Many of these applications were difficult to implement, expensive to maintain, and challenging to use. Usability was one of the biggest drivers for creating interest in and success for cloud computing service providers.

SaaS offers a number of advantages; the most obvious is tremendous cost savings. The software is priced on a per-use basis with no up-front costs, so companies get the immediate benefit of reducing capital expenditures. They also get the added benefits of scalability and flexibility to test new software on a rental basis.

Salesforce.com is one of the most popular SaaS providers. It built and delivered a sales automation application, suitable for the typical salesperson, that automates functions such as tracking sales leads and prospects and forecasting. Tapping the power of SaaS can provide access to a large-scale, secure infrastructure, along with any needed support, which is especially valuable for a start-up or small company with few financial resources.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) supports the deployment of entire systems, including hardware, networking, and applications, using a pay-per-use revenue model. PaaS is a perfect solution for a business because it passes on to the service provider the headache and challenges of buying, managing, and maintaining web development software. With PaaS the development, deployment, management, and maintenance is based entirely in the cloud and performed by the PaaS provider, allowing the company to focus resources on its core initiatives. Every aspect of development, including the software needed to create it and the hardware to run it, lives in the cloud. PaaS helps companies minimize operational costs and increase productivity by providing all the following without up-front investment:

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FIGURE 5.22

Cloud Computing Environments

Increased security.

Access to information anywhere and anytime.

Centralized information management.

Easy collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers.

Increased speed to market with significantly less cost.

One of the most popular PaaS services is Google’s Application Engine, which builds and deploys web applications for a company. Google’s Application Engine is easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as a company’s web-based application needs grow. Google’s Application Engine is free and offers a standard storage limit and enough processing power and network usage to support a web application serving about 5 million page views a month. When a customer scales beyond these initial limits, it can pay a fee to increase capacity and performance. This can turn into some huge costs savings for a small business that does not have enough initial capital to buy expensive hardware and software for its web applications. Just think, a two-person company can access the same computing resources as Google. That makes good business sense. Regardless of which cloud model a business chooses, it can select from four cloud computing environments—public, private, community, and hybrid (see Figure 5.22 ).

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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. Pricing is utility-style and customers pay only for the resources they use. A few great examples of public cloud computing include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Azure, and Google Cloud Connect.

Private Cloud Private cloud serves only one customer or organization and can be located on the customer’s premises or off the customer’s premises. A private cloud is the optimal solution for an organization such as the government that has high data security concerns and values information privacy. Private clouds are far more expensive than public clouds because costs are not shared across multiple customers.

Community Cloud Community cloud serves a specific community with common business models, security requirements, and compliance considerations. Community clouds are emerging in highly regulated industries such as financial services and pharmaceutical companies.

Hybrid Cloud Hybrid cloud includes two or more private, public, or community clouds, but each cloud remains separate and is only linked by technology that enables data and application portability. For example, a company might use a private cloud for critical applications that maintain sensitive data and a public cloud for nonsensitive data applications. The usage of both private and public clouds together is an example of a hybrid cloud. Cloud bursting is 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 that a sudden spike in usage does not result in poor performance or system crashes.

Deploying an MIS infrastructure in the cloud forever changes the way an organization’s MIS systems are developed, deployed, maintained, and managed. Moving to the cloud is a fundamental shift, moving from a physical world to a logical world, making irrelevant the notion of which individual server applications or data reside on. As a result, organizations and MIS departments need to change the way they view systems and the new opportunities to find competitive advantages.

LEARNING OUTCOME REVIEW

Learning Outcome 5.1: Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.

The three primary areas where enterprise architects focus when maintaining a firm’s MIS infrastructure are:

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 becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.

Learning Outcome 5.2: Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.

The three primary areas an information infrastructure provides to support continuous business operations are:

Backup and recovery: 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.

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Disaster recovery plan: This plan provides a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster.

Business continuity plan: This details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption.

Learning Outcome 5.3: Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.

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

Availability refers to the time frames when the system is operational.

Maintainability (or flexibility) refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes.

Portability refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems.

Reliability (or accuracy) ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information.

Scalability describes how well a system can scale up or adapt to the increased demands of growth.

Usability is the degree to which a system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use.

Learning Outcome 5.4: Identify the environmental impacts associated with MIS.

Increased energy consumption, increased electronic waste, and increased carbon emissions are all associated with MIS. 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.

Learning Outcome 5.5: Explain the three components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business benefits.

The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure include:

Grid computing: A collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem.

Cloud computing: The use of resources and applications hosted remotely on the Internet. The term comes (at least in part) from the image of a cloud to represent the Internet or some large networked environment.

Virtualized computing: The creation of multiple virtual machines on a single computing device.

OPENING CASE QUESTIONS

1.Knowledge: List the ways that an agile MIS infrastructure supports Box’s business.

2.Comprehension: Describe the reasons Box can help a company with its disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan.

3.Application: Apply the concepts of cloud computing to Box’s business model.

4.Analysis: Analyze how Box can benefit from a sustainable MIS infrastructure.

5.Synthesis: Develop a way that a company could benefit from grid computing by using Box.

6.Evaluate: Assess how Box uses server virtualization to support its growth.

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KEY TERMS

Accessibility

Administrator access

Agile MIS infrastructure

Availability

Backup

Business continuity planning (BCP)

Business impact analysis

Capacity

Capacity planning

Carbon emissions

Clean computing

Client

Cloud bursting

Cloud computing

Cloud fabric

Cloud fabric controller

Cold site

Community cloud

Corporate social responsibility

Data center

Disaster recovery cost curve

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Disaster recovery plan

Dynamic scaling

Emergency

Emergency notification service

Emergency preparedness

Energy consumption

Enterprise architect

Ewaste

Failback

Failover

Fault tolerance

Green personal computer (green PC)

Grid computing

Hardware

High availability

Hot site

Hybrid cloud

Incident

Incident management

Incident record

Information MIS infrastructure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Maintainability (or flexibility)

MIS infrastructure

Moore’s Law

Multi-tenancy

Network

Network virtualization

Performance

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Portability

Private cloud

Public cloud

Recovery

Reliability (or accuracy)

Scalability

Server

Server virtualization

Serviceability

Single-tenancy

Smart grid

Software

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Storage virtualization

Sustainable MIS disposal

Sustainable MIS infrastructure

Sustainable, or green, MIS

Technology failure

Technology recovery strategy

Unavailable

Upcycle

Usability

Utility computing

Virtualization

Vulnerability

Warm site

Web accessibility

Web accessibility initiative (WAI)

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.How often should a business back up its data?

2.Why is it important to ensure that backups are working and can be restored?

3.What is the difference between a disaster recovery plan and a business continuity plan?

4.What are the three forms of MIS infrastructures and what do they support?

5.List the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure and explain why they are all critical for supporting change.

6.Explain what capacity planning is and how it can help a business prepare for growth.

7.Explain the difference between fault tolerance and failover.

8.Compare the differences among a hot, cold, and warm site.

9.What is Moore’s Law and how does it affect companies?

10.List the business benefits of using grid computing.

11.Identify the benefits and challenges of cloud computing.

12.What is a data center and why would a business develop one?

13.List and describe the three most popular cloud computing delivery models.

14.Why would a company want to use virtualization?

15.Explain why a business today would want to follow sustainable MIS practices.

16.Explain why ebusiness is contributing to the three pressures driving sustainable MIS infrastructures.

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CLOSING CASE ONE

UPS Invests $1 Billion to Go Green

United Parcel Service (UPS) will make about $1 billion in technology investments to improve the efficiency of its operations, with the goal of cutting billions more from its costs over the long term. One of its main goals is to improve the speed and efficiency of its delivery operations. To achieve that, UPS is equipping its vans with sensors that allow it to collect data about things such as fuel consumption, chosen routes, and how much time its engines spend idling. Reducing fuel consumption will help UPS not only to cut costs, but also to be more environmentally responsible. A big portion of the company’s costs comes from transporting packages by air. In fact, UPS is the world’s ninth-largest airline, so it is trying to conserve aircraft fuel as well by lowering flight speeds and better planning to avoid duplication of routes. But a lot of fuel is also burned by its trucks, and the sensors being implemented there could save the company millions of dollars.

UPS is installing about 200 sensors in its vehicles—in the brakes, engine box, and on the exterior—to collect data and pinpoint opportunities when drivers can adjust their driving to maximize fuel efficiency. The company wants to reduce idle time of its delivery trucks because each hour spent idling burns about a gallon of fuel.

The company is also installing equipment to track the routes drivers take to deliver packages. Every morning the drivers are briefed on the data captured by the sensors and how they could drive differently to save fuel. UPS wants to optimize the number of times a vehicle has to start, stop, reverse, turn, or back up.

Green Data Center

The company is also investing in more efficient cooling technologies at its two data centers, which are in Mahwah, New Jersey, and Alpharetta, Georgia. During the winter, the company can shut off its chiller equipment and use outside air for cooling.

The Alpharetta data center has a 650,000-gallon water tank outside for cooling and a heat exchanger to dissipate the heat captured in the fluid faster. The water flows in a circular motion around the data center, cooling the equipment, and the heat exchanger helps lower the temperature of the hot exhaust water more quickly.

UPS is also investing in faster server processors, allowing it to consolidate existing servers through virtualization. That helps lower energy costs and reduces the physical footprint of its servers. And the company has been consolidating smaller server rooms that were scattered around the world. These changes are saving UPS around $400,000 each year.15

Questions

1.Why do you think UPS is embracing sustainable technologies?

2.How is UPS developing a sustainable MIS infrastructure?

3.What business benefits will UPS gain from virtualization?

4.What role does each characteristic of an agile MIS infrastructure play in helping UPS operate its business?

5.How could UPS benefit from cloud or grid computing?

6.What types of ethical issues might UPS encounter with the tracking technology it has placed in its trucks?

7.What types of security issues might UPS encounter with the tracking technology it has placed in its trucks?

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CLOSING CASE TWO

Pandora’s Music Box

Napster was one of the first service providers for sharing online music. Many other companies have attempted to jump into the online music business legally, and most found little success. However, Pandora, the Internet radio site, is becoming the exception. Pandora provides users with the ability to choose specific artists or categories of music and then creates individualized playlists. Based on user feedback to Pandora’s suggestions of similar tracks, the site learns what selections each listener prefers for his or her playlist and uses that information to generate a unique customized listening experience for each.

At the heart of Pandora’s business is the Music Genome Project (MGP), a computerized jukebox of more than 700,000 works by 80,000 artists, with new ones added every day. Each selection within the MGP is categorized by hundreds of characteristics, including artist and genre and covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition, and lyrics. For example, if someone is looking for a song with a certain tempo or wants to know what the lyrics are about, Pandora can supply that information. The company has 50 employees whose sole job is to listen to and analyze music along with assigning more than 400 characteristics to each track.

Computing Merges with Connectivity

Pandora is a perfect example of cloud computing as a result of three major trends:

1.The marriage of computing and connectivity can now occur without having to be tethered to a single location. It’s among the biggest disruptive forces of modern times, one that will redefine business models for decades to come.

2.The mobile Internet is now pervasive.

3.The availability of low-cost, always-on computers—smart phones—that allow sophisticated software to conduct complex tasks on the go.

Pandora is strategically planning to reach a broad, global market by embedding itself in all sorts of Internet-enabled electronic devices that can access its services directly through the cloud. Pandora’s music offerings are now being embedded in everything from thin LED televisions to Blu-ray players to digital frames. Customers are listening to Pandora through their Blu-ray players, iPods, iPhones, and BlackBerrys, and soon cars will come with Pandora preinstalled.

The Pandora team envisions Pandora playing everywhere, allowing users to create as many as 100 stations, allowing for a nearly infinite list of musical opportunities. Since its founding in 2000, Pandora has registered more than 50 million listeners and adds thousands more every day.