Reply: Discussion Thread: Business Information

The student must then post a reply of at least 400 words by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Sunday of the assigned Module: Each reply must incorporate at least 1 scholarly citation in APA format. Any sources cited must have been published within the last five years.

The reply can be from any one of the paragraphs listed below but 400 words with 1 scholarly citation

Reply to : Victoria Reyes

Discussion Module 2

In a business, some of the most common concerns that a company leader has are efficiency and reliability of their software or equipment in order to keep a system up and running. Additionally, the way the company remains successful is by upholding its ability to be competitive. Some methods of doing that is by ensuring that the customers are satisfied with their products. In ensuring a customer is satisfied, one of the items to take into consideration is the response time when creating an interactive application or system. Another is proper delineation and separation of information among public and private areas, which a distributed database is used for.

Alternatively, another type of processing is centralized data processing where rather than disbursing the data among several databases, it is all stored in one with several redundancies and backups. Sometimes, it can be more efficient when there is one place where the data gets processed such as a centralized data processing facility, rather than on any particular device. Additionally at a centralized data processing facility, there are already established methods for processing and transmitting the data in a highly efficient manner. Lastly, reliability is dependent upon redundancy and alternative methods for the data to be transmitted such as alternative equipment to utilize when one system goes down in the building. When compartmentalization is utilized, there is a greater opportunity for success in the data center. Even on a U.S. Navy Warship, there was compartmentalization of the electricity grid. That was changed over time because of an incident where a shipwreck caused the entire ships power to go down. There was no redundancy, so they were left without any electric power. Now, the ships are created in various sections in order to prevent an outage of the entire ship at once. Conversely, if there are no redundancies, if one path stopped working suddenly, the entire system would stop working and many users would be left dissatisfied. It could also result in a loss of a lot of money and a security risk. To avoid displeasing users, data centers must be built with redundant systems and equipment as well as communication mechanisms. 

A distributed database is often used by companies who would like to promulgate or store large amounts of information while keeping it safe and out of the wrong hands. In a study on e-learning, where a high amount of resources are required, researchers concluded that a distributed database was deemed useful to make this technique of teaching more efficient and cost-effective because of data replication and the globalization process (Sathishkumar, 2021). Since there is a large amount of redundant data, there tends to be a lot of duplicate information that needs to be categorized or classified. If not properly sorted through, the repetitive data can cause confusion for some people who are looking through the databases and decrease efficiency. As a result, some researchers are developing different methods and algorithms to extract information that is necessary and accurate, to help ensure efficiency for the company, which will encourage them to continue utilizing a distributed database system (Chen, 2018, p. 439). Since this database allows access on multiple computers at once, companies prefer to use a distributed database because it helps with performance and allocating resources especially when a corporation must store and manage computation-heavy workloads (Abebe et al., 2020, p. 3573). Some other benefits to utilizing distributed databases is that they help “manage business velocity, avoid data lock-in, and keep sensitive data on-premise and insensitive data in public clouds” (Mansouri et al., 2020, p. 2). By maintaining the sensitive and confidential information within a private network and the public information outside the private network, companies build trust among their users and their clients, which tends to attract more and boost their ability to be competitive among other companies.

Productivity is another aspect that plays a vital role in making a company efficient, especially in technology where there is a lot of user interaction. Many successes are dependent on pleasing or satisfying a user with a quick and efficient system or software and user-friendly interface. To ensure competitiveness is upheld, users must be kept satisfied with an acceptable system response time for interactive applications or better. In my workplace in the United States Navy, when a Sailor or a team succeeds at something, they tend to become motivated and work harder next time, which ultimately increases productivity because more gets accomplished. The same thing occurs with any business as response times for any application improve or become faster, the developers or managers of this application become more motivated to continue improving their product and the users are satisfied, therefore wanting to buy more. When the workers become motivated and improve the response time, productivity among the users also tends to increase because less time is spent waiting for the response to come back from the server.

According to Stallings and Case (2013), an acceptable response time is from 0 to 10 seconds with anything under three seconds being the best-case scenario because of its ability to maintain the user’s attention. Above 3 seconds, concentration begins to deteriorate and ultimately anything past 10 seconds would leave the user dissatisfied (Stallings & Case, 2013, p. 57). Much of the response time is out of the company’s control; however, it is dependent highly on how fast the Internet is going and what the traffic flow looks like. Oftentimes if a server is overloaded and traffic is congested, it creates an issue in the response times of the server because it is trying to process everything as quickly as possible, but sometimes it is not good enough for the user (Modos et al., 2016, p. 95). Since technology is constantly advancing and considering how much we use it, we as customers expect the internet to be fast and easy to use. Additionally, we expect the network to be able to keep up with the new innovations. Otherwise, they will complain, and a company will be deemed untrustworthy because they are not providing for the customers desires or needs. If the distributed database is not the best method for a company, there are more methods of processing and transmitting data such as centralized data processing.

With centralized data processing facilities, it removes the processing from each end device and focuses sending the data to this facility to be processed by its computers and software. This allows for the data processing to be standardized as well as facilitated and less costly. By standardizing the process, a customer or user is more likely to see better and more consistent results because not only is it a centralized process, but it has its own control system and authority as well as support staff (Stallings & Case, 2013). Many companies are reverting back to centralized facilities and data centers because of all the benefits that they bring, such as redundancies in the equipment because it is used to create security for the data in both the information and the equipment being used (Stallings & Case, 2013, p. 73). Additionally, the centralized data centers tend to be cheaper in price and have a lot more power as well as storage space because of the ability to do in-memory computing (Stallings & Case, 2013, p. 73). Regardless, the amount of data that the internet is having to process nowadays is so vast because of how many smartphones, laptops, computers and other wireless devices are being utilized (Chen et al., 2018, p. 59). In it being so vast, it is more prone to issues where the network becomes unavailable. There are constantly new methods that are being produced so that the network and the processing facilities can keep up with the customers and remain successful.

In maintaining success, a company must prepare for the worst-case scenario, if everything were to get shut down or flood. The equipment and ways to communicate must be available When a company can eliminate unavailability by having several pieces of the same equipment, they can become the most successful and competitive. By having redundant systems in both communications and equipment, we reduce the vulnerability for an adversary to exploit the company or steal the ideas (Gao et al., 2020). In today’s data centers, some major equipment that has redundancies includes power supplies, and environmental controls such as air conditioning to ensure that the computer systems are being properly cooled. Hardware must stay cool in order to continue operating well for an extended period of time, so it is important that the air conditioning is working properly or else the system goes down altogether. Other redundancies that data centers also have include the electrical equipment to keep the network up and running and be able to send data out from the centralized facility. Most data centers need to have backup equipment in locations apart from where the main data center is located, which is why third parties exist. Regardless, an electrical outage or communication outage can cause serious problems for a business, which is why it is important to have these systems with redundancies.

Many businesses have the option of choosing between the distributed data processing or centralized data processing. More recently, it has been shown that because of redundancies and a more efficient system using data centers has proven the centralized data processing facilities to be more effective. It is important to have efficiency as well as accuracy and reliability. With a backup mitigation plan to prevent mishaps and outages, a company can be successful, productive and competitive. Additionally, the response times can continue to improve so that user satisfaction is high and productivity among the workers is high. As hardware and software continue to evolve, managers and companies must find ways to keep up with the demands of the technology world.