Information class
fislal
is_3003_chapter_5.pptxIS 3003
Chapter 5
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Case Study - Facebook
Facebook’s $59B in market cap (worth) has to come from somewhere; the Facebook management has always said that Facebook would be free to join and always will be; It has over 1B subscribers, and that costs a lot of money to maintain, upgrade, change, and support
The answer, just like for Google, is advertising; if advertising goes away, so does the free aspect of this service; Facebook does not have I.P., assets, property, or large cash reserves; it has the personal information on over 1B people that it sells to anyone, as well as ads for which it obtains revenues;
In 2013, Facebook made $4.2B in advertising after having had their IPO in 2012
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Why is the collection of personal data not to your advantage?
In spite of partnering with the Dept. of labor to help people find jobs, helping people find lost pets, and helping law enforcement track down criminals, Facebook has a dark side
It is able, and has succeeded in building complete pictures of its users; such information can be used to further the aims of government, and other undesirable organizations to control you by controlling your access to things of interest to you
The standard argument is that your personal information will never be used against you even if you have done nothing wrong; but nothing is stopping Facebook either, especially when the government is enticing (through threats, access, or rewards) Facebook to give up information about you
Making money is good, but Facebook has a terrible reputation for mishandling private information
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How Bad is it?
Consumer Reports did a study recently showing that of the 150M they canvassed, at least 4.8M were willingly sharing data that could be used against them readily
Such information included travel plans that could be used by “bad guys” to plan break-ins, liking an article on a health treatment that insurers could use to deny coverage, not adjusting privacy controls (13M), becoming part of a group defined by credit card companies to modify their treatment of you based on similar profiles of other people, etc.
93% of the people canvassed by Consumer Reports said people should be asked before their data can be used; 72% want to be able to opt-out of online tracking
The value of Facebook is based on its ability to leverage the personal data of its subscribers
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An Austrian law student was able to obtain his Facebook personal information from the Facebook Dublin office; Ireland has more stringent laws about
It was 1222 pages long
It covered only 3 years of subscribership
It included deleted wall postings, and messages with sensitive personal comments, as well as deleted email addresses
It also included his photo postings
The Facebook collection of photos grows by 250M every day
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Its sponsored stories service allows database users to see all of the numbers of businesses and products that subscribers and their friends are using
Graph search, a search engine of sorts, allows strangers to type in your name and obtain photos of you and your friends, and just about any information pertaining to your circle of acquaintances
The EU has stricter controls over Facebook and similar collection websites, but Facebook is continuing to collect all it can for revenue reasons
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The Army Pursues I.T.
The U.S Army is the biggest purchaser of I.T. equipment and services of any organization in the world; in 2013, it spent $34.1B; the number of government data centers is 2094 in 2011 although the OMB has ordered the closing of 30% of all government data centers by 2015
DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) is an overlay organization that supports all branches of the military; with its own array of I.T. services comprised of a private cloud and everything that implies; The approach to DoD I.T. is for all services to try DISA first, and then fall back on Army data centers afterwards.
The old military philosophy was also aimed at one server – one application; now virtualization allows for one server – several applications; fewer servers allow the same workload; The military is also experimenting with mobile computing (information on the go) as opposed to receiving information via telecom and then acting on same
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What are the pros and cons of any large scale I.T. network?
The more equipment that is added to a system, the more costly the system becomes, in terms of personnel as well as equipment;
But complexity also plays a role in increasing costs because problem identification, load balancing, switch overs, backing up, and over all control become much more difficult, and therefore time consuming and costly
There are also many questions, such as, how close to full capacity are servers going to be allowed before action is to be taken by software controllers to balance the load? this issue of fractional capacity may mean an unexpected breakdown; are hot backups available? are more important operations going to be relegated to specific or virtual servers?
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definitions
Data center – a facility housing computers and associated peripherals, such as telecom, data storage, security, backup power, a series of networks (intranet, Internet interface, extranets), etc.
Infrastructure components – the elements of the I.T. infrastructure are CPUs, software (System O/S, and applications), data management technology (software), telecom/networking technology (hardware and software), tech services (integration and legacy software)
Data management software – organizes, manages, and processes data from inventory, customers, and vendors
Legacy systems – older systems of various types still used and part of the network’s integrated whole
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Types of computers and terms
PC – desktop or laptop CPUs used as stand alones, or parts of an integrated computer system
Workstation – a PC with more capability, usually graphics, or special processing hardware
Mainframe – large, high capacity, high performance CPU that can process large amounts of data rapidly
Supercomputer – specially designed for tasks that require extremely rapid and complex calculations with thousands of variables and thousands of equations
Grid computing – virtual networking of all computers on a network to obtain the highest level of capability for that network
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Client server computing
Distributed processing – it is the use of several computers linked by a telecom network for processing purposes
Central processing – it is a network consisting of a large capacity computer (possibly with one or more backups) that links many workstations via a telecom network
Client/server computing – splits processing between 2 basic groups both of which are on one network; the client specifies requirements, and the server provides the client with application services
Multi-tiered (N-tiered) client-server architectures – multi-level networks, each tier being defined by web servers, application servers; sometimes additional levels are defined by security, region, complexity, etc.
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Web server – servicing web pages
Applications server – servicing various applications for specific activities, requests, or reporting
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Storage technology
Laws have made the needs for storage a strategic issue for companies; laws like Sarbanes-Oxley have put a big emphasis on long-term storage which creates demand which in turn incurs costs for companies
Magnetic disks, otherwise known as hard drives, are the most widely used means of storing data; for mobile devices, MacBook Air, tablets, etc. the memory used is called solid state drives (SSDs)
Other forms of storage include optical discs, and magnetic tape
Storage networking is where contemporary storage is capable of dividing and replicating data among multiple devices linked together
Storage area networks (SAN) link many storage devices via their own network; the SAN creates a large pool of storage capability that can be shared among several users
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SAN and Client-server networks
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San with more detail
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The mobile platform
Smartphones, iPhones, and Blackberry’s form the backbone of the new mobile world
They are the conduits for texting, email, surfing, etc.
These devices are also supported by such devices as Surfaces, Kindles, iPads, Nooks, e-book readers, etc.
So long as data can be reduced to meaningful information, the trend towards mobile usage by managers, as well as workers, will continue to grow; don’t forget the ethical dilemmas concerning employee assigned company resources that employees occasionally use for personal needs
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Consumerization of I.T. and BYOD
The consumerization of mobile devices starts with strictly private use that spreads to commercial organizations; then comes software services originally targeted at consumers, by such companies as Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Dropbox, Microsoft, and so on
The notion of BYOD (bring your own device) has arisen because of such initial targeting that soon became swept up in the commercial usage of mobile information needs; this is where the ethical concerns of mixing personal activity with company activity began
So, if companies want more productivity from their employees, they have to allow the employees to use their own mobile devices
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Moore’s Law
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Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
The observation is named after Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology - The science of using individual atoms and molecules to construct devices that can fit into micrometer and nanometer volumes to accomplish some function of importance
Quantum computing – uses Qubits (subatomic particles) that can be in more than one state (1, or 0) at once; this allows computations to become non-deterministic, and can solve problems using brute force methods; the Verona messages were solved via brute force, but took several years to do so using digital computers
Virtualization – the configuring of CPUs so that they look to an interfacing workstation like a Windows, Unix, Linux, or iOS system all at the same time; VMware is currently the most visible virtualization provider
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