Enterprise IT Infrastructure Research Articles

Generativity of enterprise IT infrastructure for digital innovation

PurposeDigital innovation requires organizations to reconfigure their information technology infrastructure (ITI) to cultivate creativity and implement fast experimentation. This research inquiries into ITI generativity, an emerging concept demoting a critical ITI capability for organizational digital innovation. More specifically, it conceptualizes ITI generativity across two dimensions—namely, systems and applications infrastructure (SAI) generativity and data analytics infrastructure (DAI) generativity—and examines their respective social and technical antecedents and their impact on digital innovation.Design/methodology/approachThis research formulates a theoretical model to investigate the social and technical antecedents along with innovation outcomes of ITI generativity. To test this model and its associated hypotheses, a survey was administered to IT professionals possessing knowledge of their organization's IT architecture and digital innovation performance. The dataset, comprising responses from 140 organizations, was analyzed using the partial least squares technique.FindingsResults reveal that both dimensions of ITI generativity contribute to digital innovation performance, with the effect of DAI generativity being more pronounced. In addition, SAI and DAI generativities are driven by social and technical factors within an organization. More specifically, SAI generativity is positively associated with the usage of a digital application services platform and IT human resources, whereas DAI generativity is positively linked to the usage of a data analytics services platform, data analytics services usability and data analytics human resources.Originality/valueThis research contributes to the literature on digital innovation by introducing ITI generativity as a crucial ITI capability and deciphering its role in digital innovation. It also offers useful insights and guidance for practitioners on how to build ITIs to achieve better digital innovation performance.

Securing the digital world: Protecting smart infrastructures and digital industries with artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled malware and intrusion detection

The last decades have been characterized by unprecedented technological advances, many of them powered by modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The world has become more digitally connected than ever, but we face major challenges. One of the most significant is cybercrime, which has emerged as a global threat to governments, businesses, and civil societies. The pervasiveness of digital technologies combined with a constantly shifting technological foundation has created a complex and powerful playground for cybercriminals, which triggered a surge in demand for intelligent threat detection systems based on machine and deep learning. This paper investigates AI-based cyber threat detection to protect our modern digital ecosystems. The primary focus is on evaluating ML-based classifiers and ensembles for anomaly-based malware detection and network intrusion detection and how to integrate those models in the context of network security, mobile security, and IoT security. The discussion highlights the challenges when deploying and integrating AI-enabled cybersecurity solutions into existing enterprise systems and IT infrastructures, including options to overcome those challenges. Finally, the paper provides future research directions to further increase the security and resilience of our modern digital industries, infrastructures, and ecosystems.

Security Ontology OntoSecRPA for Robotic Process Automation Domain

Robotic process automation (RPA)* based on the use of software robots has proven to be one of the most demanded technologies to emerge in recent years used for automating daily IT routines in many sectors, such as banking and finance. As with any new technology, RPA has a number of potential cyber security weaknesses, caused either by fundamental logical mistakes in the approach or by cyber-human mistakes made during the implementation, configuration, and operation phases. It is important to have an extensive understanding of the related risks before RPA integration into enterprise IT infrastructure. The main asset operated by RPA is confidential enterprise data. Data leakage and theft are the two main threats. The wide application of RPA technology in information security-sensitive sectors makes the protection of RPA against cyber-attacks an important task. Still, this topic is not yet adequately investigated in the scientific press and existing articles mainly concentrate on stating the RPA security importance and describing some threats. In this article, we present a flexible tool, security-oriented ontology OntoSecRPA*, which systematically describes RPA-specific assets, risks, security, threats, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures. To the best of our knowledge, there are currently no ontologies available that are specific to the RPA domain, and existing security ontologies lack RPA-related features. In the future, the proposed ontology can be updated and used in different ways, for example, as a checklist for risk management tasks in RPA solutions and a source of information for an expert system or a concentrated domain-specific source of information, which indicates its wide practical application. The proposed ontology was formally verified by applying ontology completeness assessment and used for risk assessment in a sample scenario.

Multiperspective Assessment of Enterprise Data Storage Systems: The Use of Expert Judgment Quantification and Constant Sum Pairwise Comparison in Finding Criteria Weights

Digital transformation has taken center stage in every IT organization. Data is being created at various sources: edge, core, and cloud at an unprecedented rate. For enterprise IT infrastructure, this means more places to store data and more ways to store them. Storage solutions can be broadly categorized as Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), and Public Cloud Storage, each with its advantages and potential drawbacks. Besides computing and networking, storage is one of the core physical components of an IT infrastructure. Application performance and availability depend strongly on their underlying storage. As such, the selection of storage systems is one of the critical decisions for IT executives. Assessment of Enterprise Data Storage Systems (EDSS) for selecting the one that provides a comprehensive solution requires not only the consideration of technical performance and economic feasibility but also other perspectives such as strategic, operational, and regulatory. An assessment model with multiple perspectives and related criteria will serve as a valuable reference in the decision-making process. This study uses expert judgment to validate an assessment model covering Strategic, Technological, Operational, Regulatory, and Economic (STORE) perspectives and their related criteria. Expert judgment is also used to calculate the criteria weights using the constant sum pairwise comparison method. The results can be used for the evaluation of various storage alternatives under consideration. It is anticipated that the STORE assessment model and criteria weights will be valid for IT organizations in their long-term strategic decision-making.

Предпосылки формирования системы информационной безопасности предприятия

The article discusses the problems of managing the information security of the enterprise in a changing business climate. The description, shortcomings and advantages of the existing asS TP security system are given. The specifics of the company's procedural and technological security capabilities have been revealed. The enterprise's IT infrastructure has been identified in the information security and cyber defense format, consisting of three components: the servers of applications that deliver business applications; database servers that contain business data and system administration channels to manage and monitor infrastructure that need to work together as a coherent and coordinated system. Structured architecture, uniting corporate cybersecurity in 11 functional areas covering the technical and operational breadth of enterprise cybersecurity. These functional areas are highlighted on the basis of their relative independence from each other and because they are well consistent with the way staff, experience and responsibilities are shared in the enterprise. This corporate cybersecurity architecture format provides the basis for managing the capabilities that the enterprise provides the tools of audit, forensics, detection, and preventive control. This structure provides consistent management of security capabilities and helps prioritize their deployment, maintenance, and updates over time. It also ensures strict accountability and good alignment of strategy, staff, budget and technology to meet the organization's security needs. The structure is designed to be flexible and scalable regardless of the size of the enterprise. It provides an expandable mechanism for adjusting cyber defense over time in response to changing cyber threats.

THE PROBLEM OF EDMS CHOICE FOR ENTERPRISES

The article considers the review of the specifics and analysis of the use of electronic document management in enterprises. The results of the EDMS research, the choice of vendors ' position in the local market and the enterprise's IT-infrastructure are presented. Measures to implement EDMS for more effective control of the activities of all structural divisions and improve the overall manageability of the company are proposed

A multi-view similarity measure framework for trouble ticket mining

Text similarity measures play a very important role in several text mining applications. Although there is an extensive literature on measuring the similarity between long texts, there is less work related to the measurement of similarity between short texts. And most of these works on short text similarity are based on adaptations of long-text similarity methods. Unfortunately, the description of a trouble ticket is just a kind of short texts. Thus, ticket mining applications such as ticket classification, ticket clustering, and ticket resolution recommendation often suffer from poor performance because of tickets’ particular characteristics of unstructured, short free-text with large vocabulary size, large volume, non-English dictionary words, and so on. Therefore, the ability to accurately measure the similarity between two tickets is critical to the performance of ticket mining.To address this performance issue, this paper proposes a multi-view similarity measure framework that easily integrates several kinds of existing similarity measures including surface matching based measures, semantic similarity measures and syntax based measures. Further, in order to make full use of the strengths of different similarity measures, our framework adopts four different policies to combine them. In particular, we consider a machine learning based policy that can be applied to integrate various similarity measures in a more general way, which makes our framework flexible and extensible. To demonstrate the effectiveness of measures generated from our framework, we empirically validate them on a publicly available short text data set and apply them to a real-world ticket data set from a large enterprise IT infrastructure. Some important findings obtained via the result analysis will be helpful to further improve performance.

Typical errors in the audit of the enterprise IT infrastructure and consulting services to correct them

Проанализированы и выявлены типовые ошибки при проведении аудита ИТ-инфраструктуры для любой компании с целью эффективного предоставления консультационных услуг по их устранению для дальнейшей разработки стратегии развития информационной инфраструктуры.

Office walls and roadblocks: how workflows and terminology get in the way of visibility

So many of an enterprise's security problems aren't about technology. They're about organisation. They're about bureaucratic blind spots. They're about not being able to see the forest for the trees. The kinds of artificial barriers that separate different parts of the enterprise IT infrastructure may have once been useful, but they're increasingly getting in the way of scale and the ability to deliver business outcomes.

ПІДВИЩЕННЯ ЕФЕКТИВНОСТІ МАРКЕТИНГОВИХ ЗАХОДІВ ПІДПРИЄМСТВА НА ОСНОВІ ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ НАДІЙНОСТІ ПРОГРАМНОГО ЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ

This article introduces technology to improve the effectiveness of enterprise marketing activities based on software reliability. In today's conditions of post-industrial society, it is impossible to ensure a stable and normal functioning of the organization without the use of information systems. In turn, effective use of information systems to solve current management problems occurs only if reliable software is available. The study finds that the lack of universally accepted criteria for reliability does not allow us to answer the question of how reliable the software becomes in compliance with the proposed procedures and technologies and to what extent the costs in the course of implementing marketing activities of the enterprise are justified. The paper states that the issue of software quality and reliability is considered more important than the issue of its evaluation. The main features of the management of the hardware component of marketing systems software are analyzed separately. The study notes the fact that the software for the implementation of marketing activities of the enterprise, as a special type of information resource, does not wear out in the process of operation, so that the last phase for it does not exist. Also, the article emphasizes that the first phase ("development" of the program) is also missing: the correction of the program (regardless of the reasons for which it was performed) is similar to making changes to the design of a physical device, resulting in a new device, with a different indicator of reliability. The peculiarity of the hardware component of marketing systems is that it determines the reliability of only that part of the multimedia resources that are supported by this component of the enterprise IT infrastructure. Emphasis is placed on the need to distinguish between the reliability of general-purpose hardware and the reliability of user hardware used to work with multimedia resources of marketing systems.

Practical Insights On Augmented Reality Support for Shop-Floor Tasks

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) to improve processes in production has a long history and there are various established use cases in industry and research. Nevertheless, barriers to its seamless integration in everyday shop-floor processes still remain. A holistic approach grounded on socio-technical systems theory and a practical use case in a real-world production environment serve to identify the barriers and to provide recommendations for implementing AR in shop-floor processes. As a starting point, an overview of use cases in industry and research is provided focusing on how AR is used to support shop-floor tasks. Based on this, a practical use case, where maintenance engineers were guided by a head-mounted AR device (Microsoft HoloLens), was implemented to gain insights into the current AR-technology. An experiment was carried out consisting of twelve test runs with six maintenance engineers in a real-world production setting in the automotive industry. Semi-structured interviews with the test persons and video recordings of the tests serve as a basis for data analysis. The results consist primarily of specific use case feedback from test persons and video-based observation findings. Based on these findings, we derived recommendations to seamlessly integrate AR into production processes. These results are structured around enterprise IT infrastructure, AR-technology, shop-floor process related and human-centered aspects.

PENGGUNAAN IT DALAM PROYEK NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT DI INDONESIA: IDENTIFIKASI FAKTOR PENENTU DAN DAMPAK KINERJA PROYEK

This research is a research replication of Determinants of IT Usage and New Product Performance by Barczak, Sultan, and Gultink (2007), adapted using the characteristics of different respondents which are medium and large companies in Indonesia. The first purpose of the research is to identify antecedents of the use of IT tools. The second purpose is to further explore the role of IT in building innovative capabilities that generate values for the company. The study used a quantitative approach with a single cross-sectional conclusive design to test eight hypotheses through multiple regression measurements. The eight variables to be tested are divided into two major groups, namely the determinant variable (project risk, existence of a champion, autonomy, innovative climate, IT infrastructure, IT usage depth) and impact of IT usage performance (speed of product launch to market, market performance). The result of the research shows that the variables of IT usage depth, enterprise innovative climate, IT infrastructure, and project risk have a positive and influential relationship therefore determine the use of IT in NPD than other determinant variables. Meanwhile, the impact of IT usage on project performance is affected by the speed of product launch to market with a positive and significant relationship compared to market performance variable. The practicalities of this research, among others, is to provide an alternative action for managers to increase the use of IT in the process of New Product Development (NPD).

Intelligent reliability management in hyper-convergence cloud infrastructure using fuzzy inference system

Hyper-convergence is a new innovation in data center technology, it changes the way clouds manage and maintain enterprise IT infrastructure. Hyper-convergence is more efficient and basically agile technology environment. Cloud computing is a latest technology due to provision of latest cloud services over the internet. The cloud service providers cannot promise accurate reliability of their services i.e. problem in provisioning of software or hardware failure etc. Reliability of cloud computing services depends on the ability of fault tolerance during the execution of services. There are so many factors can cause faults, such as network failure, browser crash, request time out or hacker attacks. When users are facing these types of faults, they usually resubmit their requests. However, if there is any key element involved in faults or errors, additional action may be needed to deal with system logs. If there is anomaly behavior occurred in faulted virtual machine, these VMs may need extra attention from cloud system protection and security point of view. In this paper, provision of reliability management in hyper-convergence cloud infrastructure is proposed and self-healing techniques in software as a service on the basis of failure in cloud services. Intelligent cloud service reliability framework will increase the reliability during execution of cloud service.

Signature based trouble ticket classification

When a critical system exhibits an incident during its operation, a ticket is usually generated by the monitoring systems or users to describe its issue and should be fixed by system maintenance teams in an acceptable short period of time to avoid serious economic or reputation losses. Although there are a few works about ticket classification, they suffer from poor performance because of the obvious characteristics of unstructured, short free-text with large vocabulary size, large volume, and so on.To address this performance issue, this paper proposes a trouble ticket classification framework that automatically and accurately identifies the problem type of an incoming ticket. First, a ticket partition and signature construction algorithm is developed, which integrates domain knowledge to improve the quality of data preparation and applies a local search strategy to simultaneously construct ticket groups and their signatures. And then, a signature based ticket classification algorithm is proposed to identify the problem type of an incoming ticket by finding a group signature with the most similarity satisfying the similarity threshold. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we empirically validate it on real world ticket data from a large enterprise IT infrastructure. Experiments show that our solution outperforms other alternatives in terms of the overall performance.

A pragmatic approach to managing enterprise IT infrastructures in the era of consumerization and individualization of IT

A pragmatic approach to managing enterprise IT infrastructures in the era of consumerization and individualization of IT

System situation ticket identification using SVMs ensemble

System maintenance for large and complex IT infrastructures highly depends on automatic system monitoring, and the performance of system monitoring depends on their configurations specified by system administrators. Misconfigurations and frequent configuration changes are two main causes responsible for false positives (false alarms) that can consume limited maintenance resources and false negatives (missing alerts) that can cause serious system faults. Thus, identifying situation tickets that are created by humans is a critical task to help system administrators correct and improve the configurations of existing monitoring systems to minimize the false negatives.To address this issue, this paper proposes a situation ticket identification approach based on an ensemble of Support Vector Machines (SVMs), named STI-E, to discover situation tickets from the manual tickets that are created by humans. A primary advantage of this solution is that it can label the most representative tickets from the imbalanced manual tickets by administrators with minimal labeling effort using the discovered domain words from historical monitoring tickets. The proposed SVM ensemble classification model is also able to identify situation tickets with a higher accuracy than the classical SVM classification model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we empirically validate it on real system monitoring and manual tickets from a large enterprise IT infrastructure.

Automated creation of a custom VCL cloud infrastructure

This paper describes an inter-institutional, collaborative project to automate the entire process of creating a robust enterprise network with an integrated VCL cloud. The audience is individuals seeking to establish a VCL site in environments having little or no enterprise IT infrastructure. The starting point is one or more computers with no software installed. Connection to the internet is not required. A modular approach allows the option to not create some infrastructure elements. The solution is completely open source. A secondary benefit and use of the process is the establishment of a virtualisation platform for IT infrastructure, with the attendant advantage of capital and operating cost savings.

Virtual Infrastructures as a service enabling converged optical networks and Data Centres

Cloud computing service emerged as an essential component of the Enterprise IT infrastructure. Migration towards a full range and large-scale convergence of Cloud and network services has become the current trend for addressing requirements of the Cloud environment. Our approach takes the infrastructure as a service paradigm to build converged virtual infrastructures, which allow offering tailored performance and enable multi-tenancy over a common physical infrastructure. Thanks to virtualization, new exploitation activities of the physical infrastructures may arise for both transport network and Data Centres services. This approach makes network and Data Centres׳ resources dedicated to Cloud Computing to converge on the same flexible and scalable level. The work presented here is based on the automation of the virtual infrastructure provisioning service. On top of the virtual infrastructures, a coordinated operation and control of the different resources is performed with the objective of automatically tailoring connectivity services to the Cloud service dynamics. Furthermore, in order to support elasticity of the Cloud services through the optical network, dynamic re-planning features have been provided to the virtual infrastructure service, which allows scaling up or down existing virtual infrastructures to optimize resource utilization and dynamically adapt to users׳ demands. Thus, the dynamic re-planning of the service becomes key component for the coordination of Cloud and optical network resource in an optimal way in terms of resource utilization. The presented work is complemented with a use case of the virtual infrastructure service being adopted in a distributed Enterprise Information System, that scales up and down as a function of the application requests.

Research of IHE-ITI-PIX Architecture Based on SOA System

Based on the specification model of PIX (Patient Identifier Cross-reference) in the architecture of the IHE-ITI (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise-IT Infrastructure), combining with SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) architecture, the paper points out the method of patient information interoperability between heterogeneous systems. With standardized middleware as an information carrier of architecture platform of medical information, using SOA-based Web Service technology, the interoperability of patient information between medical institutions can be achieved.

Research and Implementation of Enterprise Application Integration Based on SOA

In essence, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is distributed and shall not have any centralized control point. Any application can access an SOA network for interaction as long as it complies with the corresponding standards. A centralized SOA architecture can also be regarded as a part of SOA. The birth and development of SOA provides a new integration technology for enterprise applications. At the same time, the IT infrastructure could provide a better service, let the enterprise, customer, partner, supplier and distributor attend commercial activity conveniently and get information what they want. In order to attain this aim, they always use integration. Through this way all business entities would be related in together, share commercial data, and complete the commercial activity together. But tradition "point-to-point" integrated method unable to satisfy the enterprise's electronic commerce demand and cause high cost and low efficiency. An integration solution based on SOA(face service construction) is put forward, which utilizes the open standard and protocol, from the global viewpoint, connect the enterprise's business process and IT infrastructure. Then a unified, standardized integration platform will be established.