"An E-business system is a mission critical, revenue generating, fully available, fault tolerant system, supporting a user base of millions, how many client server applications can do that?

Infrastructure is a term we use to describe the underlying foundation of a system and in this technology overview, I will endeavour to explain some of the key differences between traditional client server systems and E-business systems."

Stephen Kay - E-Commerce Consultant.

To quickly put the two terms into perspective;

Client/server
These systems are typified by a client application, often home grown, providing basic functionality for users. This displays information requested from a central server. The central server manages the information and services the requests.

E-Business
These systems on the other hand require integration with one or more existing systems such as stock control and online payment. The customers are usually external to the organisation.

These basic operational functions, when examined in more detail below, highlight the key differences between the two models and therefore the differences in the infrastructure required to support them.

Customers
With traditional client/server applications 'customers' of the system are either internal staff, or trusted partners. Internal users are notoriously tolerant of system outages, poor performance and failures, mainly because they have no other choice. The system manager can tightly control the number of users and how they connect to the system.

The 'customers' of an E-business system are largely unknown; they could be millions in number, using different technologies to access the system. They could be friendly, or malicious and the ironic thing is, the more popular your service, the more your system is at risk.

Integration
Integration is nothing new to the IT industry, many client/server systems perform some form of integration with other systems. However, these integrations are usually with systems that have well documented integration standards, or some form of industry standard for integration such as electronic data interchange (EDI) systems.

E-business systems by their very nature allow businesses to make use of Internet technology to integrate existing processes and systems. However, because Internet technology is so new, there are very few documented, or industry standard integration methods - making E-business systems complex and problematic.

Competition
The Internet is a great way for you to reach your customers, however, it is also a great way for your competitors to reach your customers. A recent study suggested that customers were lazy more than loyal. If you stopped providing what they wanted they would simply go to the next company that did. They would then use that company until they stopped providing, and so it continues.

As competition is so fierce within Internet business, it's important that your service is available when customers want it. The term 'High Availability' is now commonplace among Internet architects, because no system means no business.

Security
Security is often not a critical issue for client/server systems. The users are internal so an element of loyalty is assumed, the system is internal so a problem will not mean public embarrassment.

E-business systems are often Internet based and therefore open to the public and public embarrassment when things go wrong. You often have no idea who exactly is accessing your system, or what for. A security breach may range from simple site "graffiti" through to large scale criminal activity such as capturing credit card information for fraudulent use.

Architecture
Client/server system managers have great control over the architecture choices of their system. They are able to control the number of users and the technologies used, from the type of PC the user has through to the speed of the network they use.

E-business system managers are not afforded that luxury. They have no control over the architecture or technology choices of the users - this means that an effective E-business systems needs to be able to cope with all architectures and technologies.

This is why the architecture of the E-business system is so important and why architecting E-business systems and testing E-business infrastructure has become an area of specialisation.

Each of the points above illustrates why having the right infrastructure to build your E-business upon is key to its success.

A system must be scalable. It must be able to handle an unknown number of customers, which will undoubtedly grow.

It must be reliable. If the service isn't available when the customer wants it, there are many more people offering the same thing you do.

It must be secure. Bringing your business online makes it more susceptible to security attacks, designing and implementing security is vital part of the process.

Systems and services must interact with 100% accuracy, to ensure that business operations such as logistics, stock control and finance are not impaired by the migration to an E-business enterprise.

E-Business Infrastructure Testing
For an overview of the testing process for E-business infrastructure, please refer to the relevant web page on this site, where you will find an infrastructure diagram and an explanation of the issues infrastructure testing addresses.