REVIEW SUMMARY CHAPTER 5: IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Information technology (IT) infrastructure as the shared technology resources that provide the
platform for the firm’s specific information system applications. An IT infrastructure includes
investment in hardware, software, and services-such as consulting, education, and training-that are
shared across the entire firm or across entire business units in the firm. An IT infrastructure consists
of a set physical devices and software applications that are required to operate the entire enterprise.
But an It infrastructure is also asset of firm wide services budgeted by management and comprising
both human and technical capabilities. Major IT infrastructure components include computer
hardware platforms, operating system platforms, enterprise software platforms, networking and
telecommunications platforms, database managements software, internet platforms and consulting
services and systems integrators. The IT have five stages of infrastructure evaluation are the
mainframe era, the personal computer era, the client/server era, the enterprise computing era, and
the cloud and mobile computing era. Moore’s law wrote in Electronic magazine that since the first
microprocessor chip was introduced in 1959, the number of component on a chip with the smallest
manufacturing cost per component had double each year. The rapid decline in costs of
communication and growing agreement in the technology industry to use computing and
communications standards is also driving an explosion of computer use. The trends in computer
hardware platform is increasingly computing is taking place on a mobile digital platform. Grip
computing involves connecting geographically remote computers into a single network to create a
computational grid that combines the computing power of all the computers on the network. Other
than that, in automatic computing, computer systems have capabilities for automatically configuring
and repairing themselves. Open sources software produced by a community of several hundred
thousand programmers around the world. Open sources software is free and can be modified by
users. Linux is a powerful, resilient open sources operating system that can run on multiples
hardware platforms and is used widely to run Web servers. Java is an operating system and
hardware independent programming language that is leading interactive programming environment
for the web. The challenges facing infrastructure that includes major infrastructure changes, agree
on management and governance infrastructure, and investing in infrastructure wisely. Solution
manual covers using the competitive forces model to determine how much spending on IT
infrastructure and where strategic investments in infrastructure should be done, and calculate the
total cost of ownership of information technology assets. The total cost owning technology
resources includes not only the original cost of computer hardware and software but also cost for
hartware and software upgrades, maintenance, technical support and training.