Infrastructure

• Most current infrastructure landscapes are the result of a history of application implementation projects that introduced their own specialized hardware and infrastructure components.

  • Mergers and acquisitions created multiple sets of the same infrastructure services that are hard to interconnect, let alone integrate and consolidate.

• IT infrastructures provide services to applications.

Infrastructure architecture

• Allows organisations to be more flexible and agile, because a solid, scalable, and modular infrastructure provides a firm foundation for agile adaptations

• Old infrastructure architectures are inconsistent and hard to expand cannot meet market demands of flexibility

• infrastructures that are constructed with standardized, modular components plus consistent and in line with business needs are needed to meet today's demands

What IT Infrastructure?

• Common defintions:

  • IT infrastructure consists of the equipment, systems, software, and services used in common across an organization, regardless of mission/program/project. IT Infrastructure also serves as the foundationupon which mission/program/project-specific systems and capabilities are built.

  • All of the components (Configuration Items) that are necessary to

    deliver IT Services to customers. The IT Infrastructure consists of more than just hardware and software.

  • All of the hardware, software, networks, facilities, etc., that are required to develop, test, deliver, monitor, control, or support IT services. The term IT Infrastructure includes all of the Information Technology but not the associated people, Processes and documentation

• Greek definition

  • originates from the words infra (Latin for “beneath”) and structure. It encompasses all components that are “beneath the structure”

  • Example

    • the structure can be for instance a city, a house, or an information system

    • In the physical world, the term infrastructure often refers to public utilities, such as water pipes, electricity wires, gas pipes, sewage, and telephone lines – components literally beneath a city's structure.

• For most people, infrastructure is invisible and taken for granted.

  • Example, Business Analyst (BA)

    • When business processes is described, the information used in the process is very important and known in great detail by the BAs.

    • How this information is managed using IT systems is “below the surface” for the BAs

    • BA's They consider IT systems to be infrastructure

  • Example, users of system

    • applications are important, use them, and know about how to use them.

    • but the way they are implemented or where they are physically deployed is invisible (below the surface) to them and hence considered infrastructure.

• **what infrastructure comprises dependents on who you ask, and what their

  point of view is.**