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Technologies A technology solves a problem. Individually they achieve little, but in combination these are the enablers of applications and hence of business. Many technologies, such as servers and local area networks, are well understood and already playing a part in today’s infrastructures. However newer technologies are ill-understood. Consultants and sales representatives may profess an understanding but – you might want to sit down for this – they don’t always know what they are talking about. The resources we provide here will not make you an expert overnight, but at least you will have some protection against the hype.
Click on a technology for a definition and links to more detailed explanations about what the technology is, what are its business benefits and how it can be deployed. Is what you want to know about not in this list? Tell us here -
This is where radio-based communications enable computers and other devices to connect without the need for wires. The technologies themselves are based on wireless transmitters and receivers of digital data, and can be used to replace wires in corporate and home-based environments. Here we talk about what wireless networking technologies exist - the current leading place technologies are Wireless Ethernet and Bluetooth. We look at the benefits of wireless networking such as flexibility and manageability, and we cover how a wireless infrastructure extends rather than replaces a wired LAN. Looking into the future, we consider HiperLAN 2 and the predicted convergence of wireless networking with the Mobile Internet.
The term “Mobile Internet” refers to the use of wireless application protocols such as WAP and iMode to give individuals access to the Web from portable devices such as mobile phones. Here we look at what technologies make up the mobile Internet, and how their use differs from country to country. We consider the benefits of the Mobile Internet for both employee- and customer-facing applications, and describe approaches to deploying Mobile Internet applications. We look at the downsides, such as security and usability, and how these issues are to be addressed in the future.
Broadband is as much a state of mind as a technology, defined in terms of what it enables rather than what it is – the transmission of sufficient quantities of information to enable such applications as multimedia streaming (think using a computer as an interactive TV) or video telephones. Broadband technologies have been around for a long time, but they have been too expensive in the past for the small business or the home user. This is currently changing with the arrival of Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL), which enabling cheap, high-speed communications across the “last mile” of wire between the telephone exchange and the socket on the wall. Here we look at the DSL family of protocols and how they fit together. Business benefits are tempered with the current difficulties in rolling out DSL in various countries. We look at these and other deployment issues and consider where broadband is heading in the future. Wireless technologies are also going broadband, or at least will be doing with the arrival of 3G wireless as described here.
Distributed applications are nothing new – parts of software applications, each running in the most appropriate place and on the most appropriate hardware. In general, distributed applications separate application functionality (say, the database engine, the security functionality, the transaction engine and the number crunching) onto different servers. Now, imagine if these application elements employed the Internet as their communications mechanism – they could be situated anywhere on the globe. Imagine still further – if different third parties managed such elements, we could access them as services over the Web. There we have it – Web services. Here we consider the essential elements of Web services, particularly the platform technologies UDDI, SOAP and XML, and we look at the efforts of software vendors such as Sun and Microsoft to provide suitable frameworks for Web services. We consider the potential benefits of Web services and examine whether such applications are deployable today. We look at the issues facing Web services, particularly the fact that much is still vendor hype, and look at how Web services will evolve in the future.
eXtensible Markup Language, XML XML has its roots in formatting languages used for document layout, typesetting and production. It is said that the languages were too complex, and a simpler version was developed. XML’s strength lies in its simplicity – it provides a basis to define all forms of digital data, from simple text and values to voice transmissions, multimedia and 3-dimensional graphics. XML provides a basis for systems to interact and to exchange data of any form. If the Internet is the global network, so XML is fast becoming the global language for information interchange. Here we describe XML both from a technical and a managerial standpoint. We look at the ways a business can benefit from XML, and how XML-based facilities can be deployed. We consider the downsides of XML and look at how it is likely to ex=volve both as a language and as a movement.
Open source software has been touted as a revolution in software development, striking fear into the major computer companies and glee into individuals who feel such companies have had their way for far too long. Open source involves software being developed using a community model (for “community” read potentially anybody with an Internet connection), and the resulting packages are released for free – that’s free as in free speech, not free beer, as one open source project developer has put it. Here we look at what open source is, and the philosophy behind the development. We consider the business benefits of open source from a development and a deployment standpoint. We examine where to start for open source development, and how the most popular packages Linux and Apaché can be deployed. We look at the downsides of open source, and how the packages and the philosophy might evolve in the future.
In the very old days, software used to be run on huge computers (mainframes) and accessed using “dumb” terminals as clients – dumb because they did not process anything themselves. Then personal computers arrived and it became possible to run software on the clients. At the same time as the arrival of the Internet, it became generally agreed that the best place for large-scale applications was on servers, and clients were best dumbed-down, as graphical displays. This oversimplification leads us to the question – what if the Internet is used to provide the connection between the server and the client? If this was the case, applications could be accessed from, and situated, anywhere, potentially managed by a third party. The concept of Application Service Provision (ASP) was born. Here we define ASPs and we look at the potential differences between ASP types. We consider the benefits of ASPs, not least the fact that smaller companies can get access to previously unaffordable applications. We look at the considerations to be made by companies thinking of using an ASP. Finally, we look at the issues with today’s ASPs and we question how these issues might be addressed in the future.
Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) provide a framework for the management of encryption keys. These keys can be used to encode information so that it can be transmitted across the very public Internet in an indecipherable form. Such encryption also provides the basis of digital signatures, so a recipient can be sure about where a given message came from. However it requires a trusted third party to manage encryption keys, not to mention a framework for delivering them to where they need to be. This framework is called the PKI. Here we look at the PKI and the components from which it is built. We consider the benefits of PKIs, notably security related, and we look at the factors to be considered by companies wanting to deploy a PKI. Issues such as interoperability and cost, are discussed, then a view is given on how PKIs are evolving.
A few years ago, some bright spark noticed that storage devices – disks, tapes and so on – were tied too closely to the computers in which they were installed. What if, he (or maybe she) thought, what if storage devices were given a network of their own, or attached to the LAN directly? In this way, all storage devices could be shared between all the computers simultaneously, new storage could be added or replaced at any time, and information could be managed, moved, backed up, secured from one central place. This is storage networking, in all its forms. Here we look at the key concepts of storage networking, notably Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network-Attached Storage (NAS). We consider the business benefits of each, and explain how these facilities can be deployed. We look at the issues still to be addressed, notably manageability and interoperability, and we consider what still needs to be done before the vision of a vast, multisite storage pool, performant, coherent and accessible, can truly be realized. |
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