Information Systems in Business

Information Systems support various businesses in many different ways from doing simple mathematics to database inquiries and retrieval. They provide can provide fast and accurate communications between different department of a business no matter the distance between them. Huge amounts of data can be stored in relative small multiple locations throughout the world and then accessed from just about anywhere an internet connection is located. The different elements of a company can compare the data stored in the system to what each other’s projects they are working on to ensure complete reliability from anywhere in the world. Using different type of systems they can produce projects that normally cannot be done in a safe manner there by reducing the physical and financial burden on the company. They can gather all of the daily information that is produced by the company and separate it into a form showing the averages and the declines that are being made so they can adjust their production to meet a specific goal. They also are able to streamline businesses and lowering production cost by implementing a more reliable system of data collecting. While working for a University in Germany they used many different types of systems to do separate projects and handle different functions like we had an email server just to handle all of the staff and students email requests. We had a database server to handle all of the data for the courses Europe that was tied in to other servers in Asia and the USA. We had a small mainframe with virtual servers to handle the school business functions like HR, IT and many of the other day to day functions of the University along with access to its stateside counterpart for online classes. There was a print server to handle the printing responsibility and there was a file server to handle all of the staff files so they could be accessed from any of the offices around the world. There was also an internet server to handle all the internet and security functions for the University. The strength of the email server was its ability to handle daily flow of tons of data going in and out without a problem and separate the students from the teacher and staff. It handled the scanning and elimination of viruses and malicious software to keep the system intact and useable. The weakness of this server was that it was under a corporate license and the updates very slow compared to some newer software that was available but that was fixed later on by acquiring a new open source email client that was continually being updated to keep it going against the more named brand. The database server was the most update part of the whole lot because of constantly changing data be it from the teachers changing their courses or textbook’s to the university adding or changing information from the different parts of the courses. Having users from different sources having to update daily the server had to be upgraded constantly to keep up with the flow of information coming in and the storage raid array had to have enough space to handle it. The mainframe handle the everyday business of the University be it from HR staffing to the textbooks inventory reports. This was the second most used of all the systems it housed the virtual servers of the various departments since it was connected to every other server it did not require a lot of resources to handle the tasks to be done. They had a set of virtual servers that held a copy of the other servers and they could also access the servers from the stateside servers in case of online classes. The print server was an older server that only had to handle the printing duties for the main headquarters and other small departments within the headquarters. It could be put within a virtual server since it only handles a small amount of resources that should save on the cooling and power cost. The file sever handled only a small portion of the files mostly search options along with read and write functions. This could also be handed off to a virtual server with a multi-core processor because it only needs a limited amount of resources to function properly. The internet sever served as a gateway from the University intranet to the outside world it handle the handing off of the IP address to the any users so that no conflicts were found along with the security of keeping the outside world out and the management of resources to keep it all flowing is a task by itself the terminals did not need to have a lot of memory to run just need a browser to access the network.

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Craig Jones
Date
12/5/2011