Business Driven Technology - Instructor’s Manual

BUSINESS PLUG-IN B4
Enterprise Architectures

LEARNING OUTCOMES
1. Explain the three components of an enterprise architecture.
Basic enterprise architectures contain three components
 Information architecture identifies where and how important information, like customer
records, is maintained and secured.
 Infrastructure architecture includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications
equipment that, when combined, provide the underlying foundation to support the
organization’s goals.
 Application architecture determines how applications integrate and relate to each other.

2. Describe how an organization can implement a solid information architecture.

An information architecture identifies where and how important information, like customer
records, is maintained and secured. Three primary areas an enterprise information architecture
should focus on are:
 Backup and recovery
 Disaster recovery
 Information security

3. List and describe the five qualities of an infrastructure architecture.

Infrastructure architecture includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications
equipment that, when combined, provide the underlying foundation to support the
organization’s goals. The following are the five primary characteristics of a solid infrastructure
architecture:
 Flexibility
 Scalability
 Reliability
 Availability
 Performance

4. Compare Web services and open systems.

Web services contain a repertoire of Web-based data and procedural resources that use
shared protocols and standards permitting different applications to share data and services.
Interoperability is the capability of two or more computer systems to share data and resources,
even though they are made by different manufacturers. An open system is a broad, general
term that describes nonproprietary IT hardware and software made available by the standards
and procedures by which their products work, making it easier to integrate them.

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

CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Backup and Recovery
Ask your students to answer the following questions:
 Do you have a backup strategy for your computer?
 How often do you backup?
 What do you backup?
 What type of format do you use for your backup?
 Where do you save the backup?
 How long do you save the backup?

Now ask your students that if you stole their computer or spilled a hot cup of coffee on their
computer right now how much information would they lose?

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Encourage your students to create a backup strategy.

CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Open Source on a Large Scale
Initially, open source was used deep within IT departments. These groups have the technical
prowess to manage and evaluate such technologies, understanding where they should be widely
deployed, and where they should have limited use. The use of open source is not limited to a few
companies that want to be on the edge. Companies that are using open source, such as Linux, for
commercial applications include Winnebago Industries, Merrill Lynch and Co, and L. L. Bean.

 Fundamental issues with open source software development

While vast numbers of the current technology community members are proponents of open
source, there are also people on the other side of the debate. The most obvious complaint
against open source software involves intellectual property rights. Some software development
companies do use the copyright and patent rights provided for software developers as their
primary source of income. By keeping their software source code hidden, they can demand
fees for its use. While most software is written for internal use, the fees from sale and license
of commercial software are the primary source of income for companies which do sell
software. Additionally, many companies with large research and development teams often
develop extensive patent portfolios. These companies charge money for the use of their
patents in software, but having software be open source means that there is a potential to have
a nearly infinite number of derived software using patented technology, unbeknownst to the
patent holder.
Another common argument, one that is more difficult for open source advocates to
contradict with hard facts, is that closed source development allows more control over the final
product. The theory behind this argument is that open source software is primarily a volunteer
effort, while closed-source development is typically a salary-driven effort. By having the
monetary resources to fund developers and management, and the ability to force development
in a given direction, closed source proponents argue that development can be more efficient
and more focused.

 Legal risks
The legal risks of adopting open source software may not be confined to intellectual property
problems. "Open source" describes a belief that software is best written in an open
collaborative process in which the resulting product is freely available to others to use,
improve, and distribute. Early proponents of open source based it on moral principles of free
access, while later supporters have promoted it as a viable business model for commercial
developers and users.

 Licensing issues
Open source comes with unusual license restrictions that may impact a company's strategies,
particularly the risk that its own proprietary software may be "tainted" by a duty to open its
source code to others. This risk is different from the infringement risk. Open source is not in the
public domain but instead is available for use only under one of a variety of licenses that

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impose restrictions on users. These licenses differ, and it is important to know and observe
their terms.
Linux has been distributed under the General Public License (GPL). One risk under the
GPL stands out: the possibility that a user's proprietary code will be "tainted" by a duty to make
its source code open. If a user of GPL code decides to distribute or publish a work that in
whole or in part contains or is derived from the open source or any part thereof, it must make
the source code available and license the work as a whole at no charge to third parties under
the terms of the GPL (thereby allowing further modification and redistribution). In other words,
this can be a trap for the unwary: a company can unwittingly lose valuable rights to its
proprietary code.

 Areas (departments, companies, industries, etc.) where open source makes most sense
Open source is most useful in areas of technology that are well understood. Proprietary
companies have the advantage in new technology realms due to better information regarding
real-world customer needs and their ability to experiment in parallel regarding the satisfaction
of those needs.
Open source also makes most sense in "infrastructure." Most contributors to open source
do so free of charge. This means that their work will tend to be oriented towards areas of
interest to themselves. Infrastructure is of necessity oriented towards technical personnel, and
thus the interests of the open-source contributors and end users (technical personnel) align
closely. Open source is being used successfully in government, industry, and education.

 An assessment of the competition (e.g., open source vs. Microsoft)

A number of major software companies, such as Microsoft, oppose the GPL due to its open
nature. Microsoft has continually argued that the software license makes it difficult for a
company to protect intellectual property because it forces a company to expose to competitors
the blueprints of any code it uses that are licensed under the GPL. Here is an overview of the
current operating systems and the percentage of usage:

OS Group Percentage Composition

Windows XP, 2000, NT4, NT3, Windows 95,
Windows 49.6%
Windows 98
[GNU/]Linux 29.6% [GNU/]Linux
Solaris 7.1% Solaris 2, Solaris 7, Solaris 8
BSD 6.1% BSDI BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
AIX, Compaq Tru64, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO Unix,
Other Unix 2.2%
SunOS 4 and others
Other non-Unix 2.4% MacOS, NetWare, proprietary IBM OSs
Unknown 3.0% Not identified by Netcraft OS detector

 Security issues
The reason viruses are written for Microsoft is because most people use it. Therefore, if 90
percent of software was open source there would be just as many attacks, only worse. Imagine
smart hackers with access to source code.
Those in favor of open source say that because everyone has access to the code, bugs
and vulnerabilities are found more quickly and thus are fixed more quickly, closing up security

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holes faster. They also point out that any and everyone is free to create a better, more secure
version of the software.
Those on the other side maintain that a closed system in which only trusted insiders debug
the code makes it less likely that discovered vulnerabilities will be exploited before they can be
patched.
They also point out that there are many reasons (in addition to market share) that are
unrelated to the technical security of the software but that can account for a larger number of
attacks against proprietary software. One is the nature of the “OS wars” – because open
source software has traditionally been more difficult to use, those who gravitate toward it tend
to be more technically savvy. The larger number of self-proclaimed hackers who are pro-open
source and anti-Microsoft means there are more people out there with the motive and the
means to write malicious code targeting Windows systems.

 The need for standards

Open standards are published standards that are unimpeded by patents and copyrights. They
form the basis of all consumer electronics, including radio encoding standards, film and music
recording standards and even the power supply standards used by the wall sockets.
Standards play a large role in the running of modern computer systems. They allow users to
purchase new hardware with confidence that it will work with their existing hardware. They
allow users to connect their computers together into a network in which the applications
running on them can talk to each other. They also support healthy competition, because if a
computer or program uses the correct standard, it can do tasks independently of who made the
hardware, who wrote the software, and even where in the world the computer is operating.
Open standards (i.e., open protocols) are often quoted as being more important than open
source code. Yet, both are necessary, since open source projects depend on open protocols
(think Apache and HTTP, Mozilla and HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Sendmail and SMTP), but that
proprietary products do, too (IIS, IE, Exchange).

CLOSING CASE ONE

Chicago Tribune’s Server Consolidation a Success
1. Review the five characteristics of infrastructure architecture and rank them in order of their
potential impact on the Tribune Co.’s business.
The following are the five primary characteristics of a solid infrastructure architecture:
 Flexibility
 Scalability
 Reliability
 Availability
 Performance
Student rankings will vary. The important part of the answer is their justification for the ranking.
Makes for an excellent classroom debate.

2. What is the disaster recovery cost curve? Where should the Tribune Co. operate on the curve?
A disaster recovery cost curve charts (1) the cost to the organization of the unavailability of
information and technology and (2) the cost to the organization of recovering from a disaster
over time. Figure B4.4 displays a disaster recovery cost curve and shows that where the two
lines intersect is the best recovery plan in terms of cost and time. Creating an organization’s

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disaster recovery cost curve is no small task. It must consider the cost of losing information
and technology within each department or functional area, and the cost of losing information
and technology across the whole enterprise. During the first few hours of a disaster, those
costs will be low but become increasingly higher over time. With those costs in hand, an
organization must then determine the costs of recovery. Cost of recovery during the first few
hours of a disaster is exceedingly high and diminishes over time.

3. Define backups and recovery. What are the risks to the Tribune’s business if it fails to
implement an adequate backup plan?
A backup is an exact copy of a system’s information. Recovery is the ability to get a system up
and running in the event of a system crash or failure and includes restoring the information
backup. If the Tribune failed to backup and it lost all of its servers it would be devastating for its
business.

4. Why is a scalable and highly available enterprise architecture critical to the Tribune Co.’s
current operations and future growth?
Scalability refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands. Availability (an
efficiency IT metric) addresses when systems can be accessed by employees, customers, and
partners. High availability refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for
a desirably long length of time.

5. Identify the need for information security at the Tribune Co.

Information security is important for everyone and every organization. The Tribune needs to
keep its sensitive information secure and ensure it is protected against hackers and viruses.

6. How could the Tribune Co. use a classified ad Web service across its different businesses?
The Tribune could write a Web service ad that it could then use across all of its different
businesses. That is the advantage of Web services, you write the code once and can reuse it
as many times as you need.

CLOSING CASE TWO

Fear the Penguin
1. How does Linux differ from traditional software?
Linux is developed using incremental phases or a type of agile methodology. Programmers
from all over the world can write changes to Linux. Traditional software development, such as
the waterfall approach, only allows changes during the development phase which is generally
in the middle of the project. Allowing changes at anytime during the SDLC would not happen in
a traditional software development project.

2. Should Microsoft consider Linux a threat? Why or why not?

Answers to this question will also vary. Some students will agree with Microsoft stating that
Linux is not a threat since the market that uses Linux typically would not use Microsoft, but
would probably use UNIX. Linux offers very little support, and most organizations that use
Microsoft require the security of knowing that their software is supported and that they can get

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help from professionals 24x7. Other students will argue that Linux is a threat since it is an
operating system and Microsoft’s main business in operating systems.

3. How is open source software a potential trend shaping organizations?

More and more customers are demanding that open-source software be available for all
systems. Many customers find themselves in the position of having to pay enormous sums of
money to customize software. If the software was open-source, they could customize it
themselves. In the future, more and more software vendors will open up their proprietary
systems and offer open-source systems.

4. How can you use Linux as an emerging technology to gain a competitive advantage?
Answers to this question will vary. One of the biggest advantages of Linux is cost. Any
organization that deploys Linux will save money by not having to pay for operating systems
and applications. Linux offers a competitor to Microsoft Office that is compatible with Microsoft
Office and free. The biggest competitive advantage for Linux is currently cost.

5. Research the Internet and discover potential ways that Linux might revolutionize business in
the future.
Answers to this question will vary. The important part of your students’ answers will be their
justification for how and why Linux might revolutionize business in the 21 st century.

MAKING BUSINESS DECISIONS

Instructor Note: There are few right or wrong answers in the business world. There are really only
efficient and inefficient, and effective and ineffective business decisions. If there were always right
answers businesses would never fail. These questions were created to challenge your students to
apply the materials they have learned to real business situations. For this reason, the authors
cannot provide you with one version of a correct answer. When grading your students’ answers, be
sure to focus on their justification or support for their specific answers. A good way to grade these
questions is to compare your student’s answers against each other.

1. PLANNING FOR DISASTER RECOVERY

Project Purpose: To create a disaster recovery plan.
Potential Solution: 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 and includes restoring
the information backup. A disaster recovery cost curve charts (1) the cost to the organization of
the unavailability of information and technology and (2) the cost to the organization of
recovering from a disaster over time. Figure B4.4 displays a disaster recovery cost curve and
shows that where the two lines intersect is the best recovery plan in terms of cost and time.
Creating an organization’s disaster recovery cost curve is no small task. It must consider the
cost of losing information and technology within each department or functional area, and the
cost of losing information and technology across the whole enterprise. During the first few
hours of a disaster, those costs will be low but become increasingly higher over time. With
those costs in hand, an organization must then determine the costs of recovery. Cost of
recovery during the first few hours of a disaster is exceedingly high and diminishes over time.

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The students backup and recovery plan should include how the company is going to
backup its information, how frequently the backups will occur, where the backups will be
stored, how long the backups will be saved, etc.

2. COMPARING BACKUP AND RECOVERY SYSTEMS

Project Purpose: To research different backup and recovery strategies.
Potential Solution: Student answers to this question will vary. A few vendors might include:
 Symantec
 Storage Mountain
 StorageTek
 IBM
 Quantum

3. RANKING THE -ILITIES

Project Purpose: To understand infrastructure architecture
Potential Solution: Organizations must determine which components are most important to
their business. The five infrastructure architecture components include:
 Flexibility
 Scalability
 Reliability
 Availability
 Performance
The order of importance will vary depending on the business.

4. DESIGNING AN ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

Project Purpose: To build an enterprise architecture.
Potential Solution: The list of questions required will vary for each student. A few examples
could include:
 Is the architecture scalable for future growth?
 Does the system need a failover strategy?
 Does the system need a fault tolerance system?
 Is there a need for a hot site?
 Is there a need for a cold site?
 Is there a need for high availability?
 What are the performance requirements?

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