MIS Infrastructure and Disaster Recovery Strategies in Information Systems

MIS Infrastructure

Plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets.

Hardware

Consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system.

Software

A set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks.

Information MIS infrastructure

Identifies where and how important information is maintained and secured, supports operations and emergency plans.

Examples of information MIS infrastructure

Backup, recovery, disaster recovery, business continuity planning.

Agile MIS infrastructure

Includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support organizational goals and supports change.

Examples of Agile MIS infrastructure

Accessibility, availability, maintainability, portability, reliability, scalability, usability.

Sustainable MIS infrastructure

Identifies ways that companies can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption, supports sustainability.

Examples of sustainable MIS infrastructure

Grid computing, cloud computing, virtualization.

Backup

Provides an exact copy of a system's information.

Recovery

Able to get a system up and running after a crash.

Disaster Recovery

Able to recover information or systems in the event of a catastrophic disaster.

Business Continuity Planning

Creates a way for a company to recover and restore partially or completely interrupted critical functions within a predetermined time after a disaster or extended disruption.

Fault Tolerance

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.

Failover

A specific type of fault tolerance that occurs when a redundant storage server offers an exact replica of real-time data. If the primary server crashes, the users are automatically directed to a secondary server (high speed and high cost).

Failback

Occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations.

Low cost/speed backup strategies

External hard drives, thumb drives, or the cloud.

Disaster effects

Disrupting communications, damaging physical infrastructure, halting transportation, blocking utilities.

Hot site

A separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business.

Cold site

A separate facility that does not have any computer equipment but is where employees can move after a disaster.

Warm site

A separate facility with computer equipment that requires installation and configuration.

Disaster recovery cost curve

If you recover too slowly, your business will lose profits. If you recover too quickly, you spend too much money solving the issue.

Disaster Recovery Strategies

Activate backup/recovery facilities in secondary company data centers to transfer data, activate recovery resources in a cloud based service, activity backup systems and data at a hot site, replace damaged equipment with spare components, recover virtual machines at an alternate site, and activate alternate network routes and reroute data and voice traffic away.

Emergency

A sudden, unexpected event requiring immediate action.

Emergency preparedness

Ensures that a company is ready to respond to an emergency in organized, timely, and effective manner.

Business impact analysis

Identifies all critical business functions and the effect that a specific event may have on them.

Emergency notification service

An infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency.

Technology failure

Occurs when the ability of a company to operate is impaired because of a hardware, software, or data outage.

Incident

Unplanned interruptions of a service.

Incident record

Contains all of the details in an incident.

Incident management

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.

Key Areas of Tech Recovery Strategies

Software (applications), hardware (servers/devices), networking (wireless, LAN, cable), and data center (climate control, power supply, security).

Accessibility

Varying levels allow system users to access, view, or perform operational functions.

Availability

The system is operational during different time frames.

Maintainability

The system quickly transforms to support environmental changes.

Portability

The system is available to operate on different devices or software platforms.

Reliability

The system functions correctly and provides accurate information.

Scalability

The system can scale up or adapt to the increased demands of growth.

Usability

The system is easy to learn and efficient and satisfying to use.

Administrator access

Unrestricted access to the entire system depending on identity

Web accessibility

Means that people with disabilities can use the Web.

Web accessibility initiative (WAI)

Brings together people from industry, disability organization, government, and research labs from around the world to develop guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities.

Vulnerability

A system weakness, such as a password that is never changed or a system left on.

Capacity

Represents the maximum throughput 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.

Serviceability

How quickly third party can change a system to ensure it meets user needs and terms of any contracts, including agreed to levels of reliability, maintainability, or availability.

Moore's Law

Refers to computer chip performance per dollar doubling every 18 months.

Sustainable (green) MIS

Describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Companies' acknowledged responsibility to society.

Clean computing

Refers to the environment responsible use, manufacture, and disposal of technology products and computer equipment (focuses on production of environmental waste).

Green personal computer (Green PC)

Built using environment-friendly materials and designed to save energy.

Enterprise architect

A person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business.

Three pressures driving sustainable MIS infrastructures

Carbon emissions, energy consumption, and e-waste.

Grid computing

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

Cloud computing

Stores, manages, and processes data and application over the Internet rather than on a personal computer or server.

Smart grid

Delivers electricity using two-way digital technology. Solves the problem of the world's outdated electrical grid, making it more efficient and reliable.

Virtualization

Creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device.

Data centers

A facility used to house management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.

System Virtualization

Virtualization software makes them think they have their own dedicated computer; all VMs share the physical hardware.

Private Cloud

Serves only one customer or organization and can be located on the customer's premises or off the customer's premises (ie: Bank).

Public Cloud

Promotes massive, global, industrywide applications offered to the general public (ie: Windows Azure).

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 (ie: private cloud of the company and public cloud for consumers).

Community Cloud

Serves a specific community with common business models, security requirements, and compliance considerations (ie: all state government organizations).

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Offers computer hardware and networking equipment on a pay per use basis (ie: Google cloud storage).

Dynamic Scaling

MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements.

DRaaS

Offers backup services that use cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by disaster.

SaaS (Software as a Service)

Offers applications on a pay per use basis (ie: Google Apps).

Data as a Service

Facilitates the accessibility of business critical data in a timely, secure, and affordable manner.

Security as a Service

Involves applications such as anti-virus software delivered over the Internet with constant virus definition updates that are not reliant on user compliance.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Offers hardware, networking, and applications on a pay per use basis. Supports the development of entire systems (ie: Windows Azure).

Data granularity

Refers to the extent of detail within the data.

Blockchain

A distributed, decentralized public ledger. Means for digital information to be shared in chronological matters in a public database. Able to store around one thousand transactions.

Fine data

specific and precise data (ie: report for each salesperson or product)

Summary data

condensed overview (ie: report for all sales staff and products)

Coarse data

very broad/ high level (ie: company wide/cross department report)

Data inconsistency

occurs when the same data element has different values

Data integrity issues

occurs when a system produces incorrect, inconsistent, or duplicate data

Five Common Characteristics of High Quality Data

accurate, complete, consistent, timely, and unique

Data Steward

responsible for ensuring policies and procedures are implemented across the organization and acts as a liaison between MIS department and business

Data stewardship

the management and oversight of an organization's data assets

Data governance

refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of company data

Master Data Management

the practice of gathering data and ensuring it is uniform, accurate, consistent, and complete

Database business advantages

increased flexibility, increased scalability and performance, reduced data redundancy, increased data integrity, increased data security

Physical view of data

deals with the physical storage of data on device

Logical view of data

focus on how individual users logically access data to meet their own particular business needs

Data latency

time it takes for data to be stored or retrieved

Data redundancy

the duplication of data, or the storage of the same data in multiple places

Data integrity

a measure of the quality of data

Business rule

defines how a company performs certain aspects of its business, and typically results in either a yes/no or true/false answer

Relational integrity constraints

rules that enforce basic and fundamental information based on constraints (ie: would not allow someone to create an order for a nonexistent customer)

Business critical integrity constraints

enforce business rules vital to an organization's success and often require more insight and knowledge (ie: no product returns after 15 days at Kroger)

Identity management

a broad administrative area that deals with identifying individuals in a system and controlling their access to resources within that system by associating user rights and restrictions based on identity

Competitive monitoring

occurs when a company keeps tabs on its competition's activities using software. BI can help with this

Business intelligence dashboards

track corporate metrics (CSFs and KPIs) and include advanced capabilities to manipulate data for analysis.

Reasons business analysis is difficult

Inconsistent data definitions, lack of data standards, poor quality data, inadequate data usefulness, ineffective direct data access.

Data warehouse

A logical collection of data gathered from many different operational databases that supports business analysis activities and decision making tasks (organizational focus).

ETL/Integration layer

A process that extracts data from internal and external databases, transforms it using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads it into a data warehouse.

Data warehouse layer

Stores data from every source system over time (query and analysis).

Data mart layer

Contains a subset of data warehouse data (functional focus).