Chapter 5

Question 1

What are the three primary areas to maintain a firm’s MIS Infrastructure?

Answer 1

1. Supporting operations
2. Supporting change
3. Supporting the environment

Question 2

What is an enterprise architect?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What is the Information MIS infrastructure?

Answer 3

It identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured.

Question 4

What is the Agile MIS Infrastructure?

Answer 4

It includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals.

Question 5

What is the Sustainable MIS Infrastructure?

Answer 5

It identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption.

Question 6

What is a backup?

Answer 6

An exact copy of a system’s information.

Question 7

What is recovery?

Answer 7

The ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure. (e.g. fault tolerance, failover, and failback)

Question 8

What is fault tolerance?

Answer 8

A general concept that a system has the ability to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service. (An expensive form of backup)

Question 9

What is a failover?

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

What is a failback?

Answer 10

Occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations taking over from the secondary server.

Question 11

What is a disaster recovery plan?

Answer 11

A detailed process for recovering information or an IT system in the event of a catastrophic disaster such as a fire or flood.

Question 12

What is a hot site?

Answer 12

A separate and fully equipped facility where the company can move immediately after a disaster and resume business. (i.e. Union Bank of California)

Question 13

What is a cold site?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

What is a warm site?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What is maintainability?

Answer 15

How quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes.
Systems must be flexible enough to meet all types of business changes.

Question 16

What is portability?

Answer 16

The ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms.

Question 17

What is scalability?

Answer 17

How well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth.

Question 18

What is availability?

Answer 18

Time frames when the system is operational.

Question 19

What are the components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure?

Answer 19

1. Grid computing
2. Virtualized computing
3. Cloud computing

Question 20

What is grid computing?

Answer 20

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

• Use idle computer processing power
• Create a virtual supercomputer
• Makes better uses of MIS resources (i.e. greater scalability, more cost efficient, and process intensive tasks)

Question 21

What are some uses of grid computing?

Answer 21

1. Animated movies (i.e. DreamWorks Animation)

2. Scientific projects (i.e. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - SETI)

Question 22

What is virtualization?

Answer 22

Creates multiple “virtual” machines on a single computing device.

Question 23

What is virtualized computing?

Answer 23

Through the use of virtualization, computers can run multiple operating systems along with multiple software applications - all at the same time. (i.e. Boot Camp for MAC, Parallels, etc.)

Question 24

What is cloud computing?

Answer 24

A model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Question 25

What are the benefits using cloud computing?

Answer 25

1. Easily upgraded
2. Lower cost of ownership
3. Always up
4. Productivity anywhere
5. Off site data storage
6. No IT maintenance costs
7. Disaster assistance

Question 26

What is multi-tenancy?

Answer 26

The cloud means that a single instance of a system serves multiple customers.

Question 27

What is single-tenancy?

Answer 27

Each customer or tenant must purchase and maintain an individual system.

Question 28

What is cloud fabric?

Answer 28

The software that makes possible the benefits of cloud computing, such as multi-tenancy.

Question 29

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

Answer 29

Offers computer hardware and networking equipment on a pay-per-use basis. (e.g. Amazon EC2)

Question 30

What is Software as a Service?

Answer 30

Offers applications on a pay-per-use basis. (e.g. Salesforce.com)

Question 31

What is Platform as a Service?

Answer 31

Offer hardware, networking, and applications on a pay-per-use basis. (e.g. Google Application Engine)

Question 32

What is performance?

Answer 32

Measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction.

Question 33

What is capacity planning?

Answer 33

Determines the future environmental infrastructure to ensure high-quality system performance.

Question 34

What is high availability?

Answer 34

System is continuously operational at all times.

Question 35

What are the benefits of a solid MIS infrastructure?

Answer 35

1. Reduce costs
2. Improve productivity
3. Optimize business operations
4. Generate growth
5. Increase profitability