OIAm Preface
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Preface
Until now, most architectural methods and frameworks focused on application or software architecture. If one of those methods or frameworks paid any attention to infrastructure, it did so at a significantly lower level of abstraction than it did for the application landscape. From a historical perspective, this can be easily understood. During the first decades of IT development, most infrastructure services remained relatively straightforward. While applications advanced in functionality and complexity, hardware just got 'faster'. The turning point came during the Internet hype, when infrastructure (hardware) manufacturers started innovating and producing new products like never before. Infrastructure started to become 'smart'. At the same time, there was a massive growth in connectivity solutions. This coincided with the rapid development and deployment of new types of applications (such as e-marketing, e-commerce, ERP and data warehousing). These new applications each imposed new demands on the infrastructure, which consequently led to the development of new infrastructure services.
A silent revolution has taken place within the field of infrastructure and indeed is still going on. Many new and complex types of infrastructure services have become available, while existing services continue to gain in functionality. Traditionally separate domains (such as telephony and video) are being completely integrated into the infrastructure domain, whilst standardized applications (such as mail, agenda and team collaboration services) are being incorporated into the same infrastructure domain. This results in complex infrastructure landscapes that are becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
Most infrastructure landscapes are the result of software projects indiscriminately implementing applications, each on their own specific hardware platform. Mergers and acquisitions have made things even worse — leaving many companies with different versions of the same services, which are difficult enough to connect to each other, let alone be integrated and consolidated.
Furthermore, infrastructure has distinctive properties compared to other IT facilities:
- Infrastructure can be used by a multitude of (anonymous) processes, applications and users;
- Infrastructure does not offer (financial) benefits on its own, but serves as a utility that enables business processes to be performed.
When organizations (out of sheer necessity) turn their attention to business continuity management, or want to save on costly administrative staff, they must invest in an architectural method for modeling infrastructure to help rationalize, standardize and restructure their infrastructure landscapes. Organizations who need flexibility and agility from their IT facility will also benefit from architecture for their infrastructure, because a solid, modular and naturally scalable infrastructure provides a firm foundation for quick changes at higher levels. Tomorrow's market, full of digital natives (forming "markets of one"), asks for a degree of flexibility that can no longer be supported by infrastructures that are inconsistent and difficult to expand. It needs an infrastructure comprised of modular and standardized components.
Of course, proper project management, skilled design, construction and operation remain essential to implement and maintain reliable infrastructure services. However, to ensure that an infrastructure design is consistent and that it will able to meet current and future business needs, infrastructure architecture is indispensable. And infrastructure landscapes themselves are not the only ones to benefit from proper infrastructure architecture. To translate business, information and application architectures into solutions that really work in a real world, the supporting infrastructure services must be completely in line with the other architectures. The result will enhance architecture as a whole, and enable solutions to be delivered that are consistent from beginning to end. Infrastructure architecture is essential to complete the whole picture.
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