Enterprise Architecture

Introduction

Enterprise architecture is a comprehensive framework used to manage and align an organization's Information Technology (IT) assets, people, operations, and projects with its operational characteristics. In other words, the enterprise architecture defines how information and technology will support the business operations and provide benefit for the business.

It illustrates the organization's core mission, each component critical to performing that mission, and how each of these components is interrelated. These components include:

* Guiding principles

* Organization structure

* Business processes

* People or stakeholders

* Applications, data, and infrastructure

* Technologies upon which networks, applications and systems are built

Guiding principles, organization structure, business processes, and people don't sound very technical. That's because enterprise architecture is about more than technology. It is about the entire organization (or enterprise) and identifying all of the bits and pieces that make the organization work (Copeland, 36).

Enterprise Architecture's Benefits

Well-documented, well-understood enterprise architecture enables the organization to respond quickly to changes in the environment in which the organization operates. It serves as a ready reference that enables the organization to assess the impact of the changes on each of the enterprise architecture components. It also ensures the components continue to operate smoothly through the changes.

The Cloud Computing System

The Greek Myths tell of creatures plucked from the surface of the Earth and enshrined as constellations in the night sky. Something similar is happening today in the world of computing. Data and programs are being swept up from desktop PCs and corporate server rooms and installed in “the compute cloud.” Whether it's called cloud computing or on-demand computing, software as a service, or the Internet as platform, the common element is a shift in the geography of computation. When you create a spreadsheet with the Google Docs service, major components of the software reside on unseen computers, whereabouts unknown, possibly scattered across continents. The shift from locally installed programs to cloud computing is just getting under way in earnest. Shrink-wrap software still dominates the market and is not about to disappear, but the focus of innovation indeed seems to be ascending into the clouds. Some substantial fraction of computing activity is migrating away from the desktop and the corporate server room. The change will affect all levels of the computational ecosystem, from casual user to software developer, IT manager, even hardware manufacturer. (Hayes, 9)

In the current trend, the locus of computation is shifting again, with functions migrating outward to distant data centers reached through the Internet. The new regime is not quite a return to the hub-and-spoke topology of time-sharing systems, if only because there is no hub. A client computer on the Internet can communicate with many servers at the same time, some of which may also be exchanging information among themselves. However, even if we are not returning to the architecture of time-sharing systems, the sudden stylishness of the cloud paradigm marks the reversal of a long-standing trend.

Where end users and corporate IT managers once squabbled over possession of computing resources, both sides are now willing to ...