Page 491 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

4-22 CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

Business Impact Management (BIM) reacts at the time of a performance problem or network failure
to identify the affected applications, end users, and customers. BIM is reactive by correlating past and
present events with business impacts.
Business Service Management (BSM) means linking business and technical information into a logi-
cal whole. BSM has given rise to the next generation of management tools. BSM tools are aimed at help-
ing network executives prioritize IT projects and address their fixes based on policies that align IT with
business goals, processes, and services. With their management products already collecting volumes
of data on network, system, and application health and performance, vendors propose the next step is
correlating network health with business performance. BSM is proactive with alerting IT staff ahead of
business impacts due to infrastructure shortages.

4.2.6 Role of the IT Infrastructure

The infrastructure of a telecommunications service provider consists basically of three components:
applications and services, computers, and networks and network equipment.

4.2.6.1 Applications and Services
The concepts of applications and service are not yet clearly separated from each other. The following
differentiations are recommended.

• Business applications
• Services and products
• Business applications of customers
In several cases, services are identical to targeted applications. This is the case, for instance, with
e-mail and instant messaging.
In general, service intelligence levels are increasing, with the result that customers do not need to
engage in a significant amount of in-house development. Communications-related services can be cus-
tomized and extended to satisfy user needs.
4.2.6.2 Computers
This group of components contains all of the computing resources associated with service providers’
data centers. Application hosts and storage area resources, as well as DMZ firewalls, are typical compo-
nents. Of course, there are many more processors, but they are traditionally assigned to network equip-
ment. Further differentiation will assist in the process of subdividing infrastructure components into
software and hardware categories.
The software infrastructure comprises application- and process-independent software components
and basic services. These services are also called horizontal services. This software, built on the hardware
and network infrastructure, is the basis for applications. Examples are as follows:
• Office components and services
• Location and directory services
• Data management services
• Data interchange services
Operating systems and operating system extensions are seen as part of the hardware infrastructure.
In contrast to the logical tiers of the software infrastructure, the hardware infrastructure is divided
into physical tiers: (1) client systems, (2) server systems, and (3) storage systems. In addition, each of
these tiers is divided into hardware, operating system, and operating system extensions.
It is getting more and more difficult to draw a line between computers and networks. Due to distributed
processing capabilities, grid computing, on-demand computing, adaptive computing, virtualization of
computing resources, and utility computing, networks are practically becoming the “computer.”