What is Enterprise Architecture?
How exactly cloud computing emerged?
Enterprise Architecture(EA) is a conceptual model that defines the structure and operation of an organization. The conceptual model is an abstraction of things that are made of concepts. These concepts help people (stakeholders) to know, understand, and analyze.
Ex: Consider an organization which was started recently and how it will compete against its competitor and withstand the modern market environment.
The organization should adapt the technology upgrade so the organization transforms itself to thrive in the future. Apart from technology changes they should shine against their competitors who may be a startup or a legacy company. New business models are introduced by upcoming technologies and due to this customer expectation and regulation of the products are also changed.
So organization includes business process, products, data, stakeholders, technologies, standards and so. These are worked together to create value and delivered to their customer. The customer buys the product and makes it profitable.
These parts of the business are collectively fit together by Enterprise Architecture which describes how the business is constructed.
Why EA is important?
It identifies the primary part/component of the business and shows the relationship between them. So we are able to understand what we need and what we build on the business to make profits.
It is applied to any kind of organization. So that only we call it enterprise architecture.
The environment in which organizations are operating in complex and all organizations which among selling the same product but with different vision and mission. Ex: Pepsi and Coke.
Enterprise Architecture focuses on simplifying the complexity and understand how business and technology work together. So the organization can change their business models and adapt the technology advancement.
Domains of EA :
Business Architecture
✔️ How does a business operate?
✔️ How business processes are important among their relationships?
✔️ How the business is moving in the context of the organization by considering its standards, vision, mission, capabilities?
The above queries are considered here and others like roles and responsibilities, product metrics, project models are also considered.
By doing modeling this architecture we can figure out how technology or information technology supports the business.
Application Architecture
It defines software solutions to adapt to the changes.
The software was used by the organization for its business that may depend on their needs and may differ from others. The organization may build or buy the software but the requirements have changed over time by the user. To overcome this, the organization keeps adding features required by the user. If the software fails to adapt or the architecture is weak then need patchwork or spending time and money to sort out/maintain.
Data Architecture
Applications need data to work. Data gets from the user is stored in different formats like spreadsheets, databases, documents, and more to manage and maintain.
It helps to model the data because data are generated in gigabytes or petabytes. Since data are generated from technology, user and so.
Due to the complexity in managing, formatting, organizing we need data architecture.
Technology Architecture
It describes how an infrastructure ultimately needed to run the business applications. Here, physical machines, routers, storage, software are involved to support the above stuff.
So technology helps the business to achieve its goal by supporting its operations. IT will adapt to changes because the business will always change(due to market and user changes).
Note: The above mentioned images are just for reference.
How exactly cloud computing emerged?
I get wondered after reading the articles and resources related to EA. Because I came to know how cloud emerged for business utilization.
It’s simple. Cloud vendors take the complexities of application architecture, data architecture, and technology architecture from the business. So they put that on their cloud and pay for what they use.
