Identify Strategies for Dealing With Common Hardware Risks

Overview of Auctions and Their Relevance Auctions have long been recognized as an essential market mechanism, rooted in traditional supply-and-demand principles. With the advent of the Internet, auctions have transitioned into the digital realm, offering new perspectives on how products and services are priced. These perspectives include:

1. Technical: The infrastructure supporting online auctions.
2. Functional/User-Based: How users interact with online auction platforms.
3. Consumer Behavior: The psychology and behavior of participants in online auctions, a subfield within marketing science.

The Intersection of Consumer Behavior and E-Commerce The study of consumer behavior in online auctions intersects heavily with e-commerce, a field that continues to garner significant attention from major retailers like Walmart. This growing interest has led to the establishment of various international journals such as:

• Electronic Markets
• International Journal of Electronic Commerce
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC): While its focus is broad, the JCMC frequently highlights topics related to e-commerce.

Key Articles and Contributions: In the field of consumer behavior, noteworthy articles have been published in prominent journals like the Journal of Marketing, focusing on the managerial aspects of consumer behavior in auctions. Additionally, newer journals have explored topics such as:

• The interplay between web technologies and market mechanisms.
• The structure of electronic marketplaces.

Understanding Market-Based Coordination in E-Commerce

1. Direct-Search Markets: Where future trading partners independently seek each other out.
2. Brokered Markets: Where brokers facilitate the search and connect buyers with sellers.
3. Dealers Markets: Where dealers maintain inventories to buy and sell.
4. Auction Markets: Dynamic platforms where buyers and sellers negotiate prices in real time.

Market-based coordination primarily takes place in open electronic marketplaces, characterized by multiple buyers and suppliers. These marketplaces contrast with electronic hierarchies, which involve long-term supplier-customer relationships.
Auctions and the Internet: A Perfect Match Online auctions are exceptionally well-suited to the Internet, offering a natural fit for the medium’s capabilities. As the Web continues to mature, online auctions are poised to become even more ubiquitous, making them a critical subject of study. Recent reports and articles emphasize the growing attention auctions are receiving in e-commerce discourse.
Insights from a Prototype Online Auction Project: To explore the potential of online auctions, a prototype auction platform was developed and tested with a group of students. This project, conducted in collaboration with the research program Open Networks as the Future Marketplace at NR, aimed to analyze and refine the online auction experience. The findings are organized into four sections:

1. Examples: Highlighting existing electronic and Internet-based auctions like Onsale.com.
2. Prototype Description: Details of the auction platform developed by NR.
3. Testing and Data Collection: Insights from user testing and web-based questionnaires to gather consumer behavior data.
4. Discussion and Conclusion: A summary of findings and final remarks on the study.

Conclusion Online auctions are a fascinating and evolving component of e-commerce. With their unique ability to combine traditional market mechanisms and the flexibility of the Internet, auctions represent an essential area of research and innovation. Projects like the NR prototype provide valuable insights into the dynamics of these platforms, paving the way for their continued integration into modern marketplaces.

Scalability is the ability of the system to grow and be able to handle more clients and transaction volume as needed. Planning for scalability ensures that your investment in hardware will not just go down the drain as your business grows because the site will be able to handle current and future user needs. For that reason, when you plan for scalability you must focus on:

1. Current volume (or expected volume for the immediate future)
2. Projected volume over time
3. Scalability solutions involve various components of the network, including servers and other hardware.

• Failover: Failover is a strategy for dealing with server failure by having other servers take on the load. In the Requirements Definition, the Web team has defined the up-time requirements. Most sites (again, in particular, e-commerce sites) require high fault resilience to achieve those up-time requirements. In other words, failover strategies enable the site to provide the highest levels of uninterrupted service. There are a variety of failover approaches that a Web team can take. The final choice depends on up-time requirements and the available budget.
• Disaster Recovery: It is important to plan for the possible failure of key site hardware. The design should include supplemental equipment to mediate hardware failure. This equipment may include: Hot swappable disks: disks that can be safely removed and replaced from a server without turning the server off. RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks): a set of techniques for combining disk drives into an array of drivers. Data is written across a number of drives, thus reducing the loss of data should one disk fail. There are several levels of RAID that can be implemented to provide data protection in the event of hardware failure (such as striping data across drives, or mirroring the data onto two drives).
  
  1. Extra network connectivity hardware (NICs, hubs, routers)
  2. Extra servers
  3. Extra processors
  4. Other extra hardware equipment
• Security as Risk Factor: Web sites may also fail due to outside attacks by hackers. A firewall ^[1]provides the primary line of defense against attackers. Selecting a firewall requires factoring in a number of considerations, including cost, complexity, performance needs, the level of security required, as well as the company's existing security policy requirements for monitoring access control and authentication.
• Service Agreements:An important strategy in managing hardware risks that is often overlooked is to pay close attention to service agreements. Service agreements vary in terms of the guarantees of up-time and turnaround. The more critical the need for 100% up-time, the more expensive the service agreement is likely to be. In some cases, a manufacturer's representative(s) may be on site or available 24 hours, 7 days a week. In others, the system may simply alert the administrator via a pager of a system problem. The administrator then contacts the appropriate personnel as soon as possible. You must weigh your needs and match them with your budget, but you should not neglect this aspect of your strategy since a lot will depend on these agreements when you're in trouble.

In the next lesson, you will review what you have learned in this module about planning for a successful network architecture.

Click the Quiz link below to check your knowledge of connectivity and security hardware and the problems associated with it.
Connectivity Security Hardware - Quiz

[1] Firewall: A system that controls access between two or more networks. With a firewall, companies can control employee Internet access and access to company computers from outside the corporation. A firewall is an extra layer of security built into computer systems set up at the Web site or at the ISP's site that can be used to monitor and filter both incoming and outgoing requests.