Scaling for E-Business

1.5. Overview of the Quantitative Approach

Speed, around-the-clock availability, and security are the most common indicators of quality of service of an electronic business site. Management faces a twofold challenge. On one hand, companies must meet customer expectations in terms of quality of service. On the other hand, companies have to keep site costs under control to stay competitive. Therefore, capacity, reliability, scalability, and security are key issues to e-business site managers. E-business sites are complex computer-system architectures, with multiple interconnected layers of software and hardware components, such as networks, caching proxies, routers, high speed links, and mainframes with large databases. The nature of e-business ...