Infrastructures for Information Technology Systems: Perspectives on Their Evolution and Impact

摘要

This paper attempts to clarify infrastructure's definition and its impact and reach. Despite the wide use of the term and the importance of the entities it represents, the notion of infrastructures has not been thoroughly addressed. We use different perspectives for defining infrastructures and investigate the intricate relationships a system has with its infrastructure. In order to deal with the complexity of the infrastructure notion, we provide a diverse set of classifications. We focus on the information technology infrastructure and its security and survivability. We investigate the design issues for building evolv-able, resilient, disaster-hardened infrastructures.