Cloud and Edge Networking

3Digital Infrastructure Architecture

3.1. The evolution of enterprise information system architectures

There are major steps forward every 20 years or so in information systems architectures for businesses. In Figure 3.1, we have represented the major steps since 1960, and the digital infrastructure architecture corresponds to the years 2020–2040.

In the 1960s, there was a hardware infrastructure composed of computers ranging from mainframes to minicomputers. On these devices, application services written in languages adapted to the category of applications were running (and sometimes still are). From 1980 onward, infrastructure services appeared between the hardware infrastructure and the application services, that is, all the common processes used to control and manage the environment. From the 2000s onward, the first datacenters appeared, supporting a first generation of digital infrastructure and in particular storage virtualization. Infrastructure services continue to develop by providing more and more common functions to the enterprise such as security or resilience. Finally, the 2020s only consolidate this architecture by integrating Cloud Continuum into the standard infrastructure and developing many functions to completely virtualize all physical devices. Infrastructure services continue to increase with intelligence, automation and flexibility features. This increase is such that many functions that were individualized in application services are being integrated ...