PBA Zone : IT Environment : Other Systems Area
At any given point in time, there are many existing systems in production as well as many systems being planned. These systems can often be very different. This large degree of variation is part of the complexity and cost an IT organization must manage. Furthermore, each of these systems has requirements from the IT organization (management, people, integration, data center services, etc…).
Examples:
> other store systems utilizing the same data center services
> POS, PSP, Video on Demand, etc…, Mobile POS
> other systems in the centralized data center
> ERP, CRM, e-commerce, databases, email, etc…
Related Solutions in the Data Center
Related solutions in the data center include those separate solutions/services which the solution interacts/integrates and/or communicates with. For example, an e-commerce solution should place increased load on the corporate billing and shipping systems. Therefore, these external services should be analyzed for impact and adapted for the impact (if necessary). Related solutions can also include those services which a given solution utilizes but is not controlled by the company. An example might be an e-commerce solution impacting an outsourced credit card transaction system.
Un-Related Solutions in the Data Center
At first, it might seem like this area isn’t very important. However, this focus area (while often under analyzed) can significantly impact the success of an organization if not understood and planned for appropriately. An example would be an e-commerce’s use of the routing services being utilized through the firewall in the DMZ. If the DMZ has both the e-commerce and company communication website, the routing service might be taxed by the increased activity which could degrade the perceived performance of the company communications website. While the two systems are not related, they both utilize shared data center services. Furthermore, this unrelated impact doesn’t always imply data center services. It could also include the fixed time and effort of support personal to give the proper attention to different solutions in their day to day activities. If the solution channels time, energy, money and capabilities from other solutions within the data center, that impact should be analyzed and appropriate plans should be designed.
Perspective Capture Questions: Other Systems:
a) What are the relevant current and near term planned business services and systems in the Data Center?
This includes related and unrelated systems. Remember, it’s important to find other systems that that might be unrelated that often compete for the same resources (example: The HR system and the Supply Chain system might both compete for the same DNS services. It’s important to identify these systems.
b) What are the architectures of these systems and services?
c) How do these systems utilized data center resources and services?