e-business Infrastructure
In the previous module, you focused on networking technologies—how data moves across local networks, the public Internet, and private interconnects. This module builds on that foundation by shifting attention to the baseline infrastructure that makes an e-business viable in the real world. Even the best application design will fail if the underlying platform cannot deliver availability, performance, security, and operational control.
We will focus on three baseline technology categories:
- Hardware (compute, storage, and network devices)
- Operating systems (the platform layer that hosts applications and services)
- Systems management technologies (tools and processes that keep the environment stable, secure, and observable)
What “viable” means for an e-business
An e-business is not merely a website. It is a service operation with expectations around uptime, response time, data protection, and predictable change. Viability typically means the infrastructure can consistently deliver:
- Availability: resilience against component failure and rapid recovery when incidents occur.
- Performance: acceptable latency and throughput under normal and peak demand.
- Security: protection of customer data, payment workflows, identities, and administrative access.
- Scalability: the ability to grow capacity without redesigning everything.
- Operability: monitoring, logging, patching, configuration control, and repeatable deployments.
Connectivity infrastructure
Connectivity infrastructure describes the underlying telecommunication networks required for an Internet presence. For an e-business, connectivity is more than “having a connection”—it is about whether users can reliably reach your service and complete transactions. Several characteristics help describe connectivity readiness:
- Connectivity infrastructure: the quality and capacity of telecom networks that provide Internet access and backbone transport.
- Pervasiveness: how broadly the Internet is used by the population (a proxy for market reach and expectations for online services).
- Sectoral absorption: the level of Internet adoption within organizations (how “digitally capable” businesses, schools, and institutions are).
- Organizational infrastructure: the number and capability of service providers (ISPs, mobile carriers, hosting providers, cloud regions).
- Geographic dispersion: how evenly those providers and services are distributed (important for latency, redundancy, and disaster recovery).
- Sophistication of use: not just how many people use the Internet, but how they use it (e.g., banking, digital identity, mobile payments, APIs).
From a technical planning perspective, these factors translate into practical decisions: where to host (on-premises, cloud, or hybrid), how to design for redundancy, whether to use content delivery networks (CDNs), how to manage DNS, and how to meet user expectations across regions.
Geopolitical and organizational issues
Infrastructure choices are constrained by more than technology. E-business platforms operate inside legal, economic, and cultural environments that can determine whether a design is feasible or compliant.
Government and regulatory environment
Government policies influence data handling, taxation, cross-border commerce, and acceptable security practices. Effective partnership between public and private sectors often determines how quickly connectivity improves and how predictable regulation is. Policies involving foreign investment, infrastructure funding, subsidies, and taxation can directly affect where you can operate and what it costs.
Cultural and social factors
Trust is a core dependency for e-business. Cultural attitudes toward online payments, digital identity, and financial institutions shape adoption. If users distrust online commerce, you may need stronger verification, alternative payment options, clearer refund policies, or localized customer support.
Technology readiness and skills base
A modern e-business environment depends on a skills base: administrators who can patch and harden systems, engineers who can build reliable services, and support teams who can respond to incidents. The adoption of uniform technical standards (security protocols, payment rails, identity standards, interoperability) also reduces integration friction.
Financial and economic constraints
E-business is tightly coupled to financial infrastructure: payment processing, banking stability, currency exchange rules, fraud controls, and the availability of reliable payment options. Economic factors also affect logistics and distribution—if your business depends on shipping physical goods, supply chains and trade policies are part of your infrastructure reality.
Baseline technologies for e-business viability
1) Hardware
Hardware provides the capacity and reliability characteristics your services depend on. In modern architectures, “hardware” may be physical servers you own, virtualized infrastructure, or cloud-managed resources, but the same planning concerns apply:
- Compute: sizing for peak load, concurrency, and burst behavior; planning for redundancy (N+1) and failover.
- Storage: performance (IOPS/throughput), durability, backup strategy, encryption at rest, and recovery objectives.
- Network: bandwidth, latency, segmentation, firewalls/WAF, load balancing, and DDoS protections.
A key infrastructure question is how you handle failure. E-business platforms must assume components will fail and design for continuity through clustering, load balancing, replicated storage, and tested recovery procedures.
2) Operating systems
The operating system is the control layer for security, reliability, and process isolation. OS selection and configuration decisions influence patch cadence, vendor support, application compatibility, identity integration, and operational tooling. Practical OS considerations include:
- Security baseline: hardening standards, access control, encryption support, auditing, and vulnerability management.
- Stability and lifecycle: long-term support, predictable updates, and compatibility with critical middleware.
- Operational integration: identity (SSO), configuration management, logging, monitoring agents, and automation support.
- Workload fit: web tiers, application servers, database servers, container hosts, and edge components may have different needs.
3) Systems management technologies
Systems management is what turns infrastructure into an operated service. It covers the tooling and practices used to maintain control over change and to detect issues before they become outages. In an e-business context, systems management typically includes:
- Monitoring and alerting: availability checks, performance metrics, and actionable alerts tied to service objectives.
- Logging and audit trails: centralized logs for troubleshooting, security investigations, and compliance reporting.
- Configuration and patch management: consistent baselines, automated updates, and drift detection.
- Backup and recovery: tested restores, defined recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
- Capacity and cost management: forecasting growth, right-sizing, and avoiding resource exhaustion.
- Incident response: procedures for triage, rollback, communication, and post-incident review.
A recurring theme in this module is that “running” an e-business is as important as “building” it. Systems management reduces downtime, limits security exposure, and ensures changes can be introduced safely.
Module roadmap
Throughout this module, you will learn how these baseline technologies support e-business viability and what issues to evaluate when selecting them for a solution. By the end of the module, you will be able to perform the following tasks:
- Define the role of hardware
- Describe the considerations surrounding the adoption and implementation of hardware
- Define the role of operating systems
- Describe the considerations surrounding the adoption and implementation of operating systems
- Describe how systems management products work and affect e-business solutions
The next lesson focuses on hardware—what it does in an e-business platform and how to evaluate it against reliability, performance, and operational requirements.