Informal infrastructure

Metaphase Metaphase offers a Web-centric information infrastructure that harnesses its customers intellectual capital to drive product innovation and manage the complete product life cycle. 

The ability of IT groups in the pharmaceutical industry to build effective information infrastructures in the medium- to long term is going to be dependent on a number of factors yet to be resolved. Particularly ... 

Plant use is less biotechnologically advanced and fundamentally more complex. The first generation of plant metabolic engineering met with mixed success and produced unanticipated results — problems that are not necessarily restricted to manipulation of carotenogenesis. The reason is that predictive metabolic engineering relies on the establishment of both needed tools and an information infrastructure... 

This will involve two facets. First, where patients now enjoy full or nearly full insurance coverage for prescription drugs, they are likely to be asked to assume a larger share of the cost of drug therapy, if only to focus their minds on the relative cost effectiveness of rival products. Second, however, to allow both patients and their physicians to act as more cost-conscious purchasers of prescription drugs, an information infrastructure will emerge, or should emerge, that can provide potential users of pharmaceutical products with objective, science-based information on the prices and relative... 

Reinhardt, Uwe E. 2004. An Information Infrastructure forthe Pharmaceutical Market. Health Affairs 23(1) 107-112. 

NIST Critical Information Infrastructure Brochure http //www.itl.nist.gov/itlcipbrochure.pdf... 

Abstract Critical Information Infrastructure constitutes a subset of... 

Keywords Critical Information Infrastructure Information Society ... 

By definition, Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) encompasses both the public and the private sector and also encompasses systems in agriculture, food, water, public health, emergency services, government, defense industry, information and telecommunications, energy,... 

The Internet, the very same element that has made the Information Society a reality has also allowed all kinds of hacker communities to flourish, by providing them with increased and inexpensive communication means. This not only has resulted in vast increase in the numbers of potential attackers, but has also led to a wide proliferation of malicious tools and techniques that are now available to any interested party, literally one click away. Thus, the threats against the critical information infrastructure are many and the likelihood of their appearance is very high. Similarly, considering that attacks are becoming all the more sophisticated, one concludes that the likelihood of a serious attack to succeed is also very high. 

Finally, the definition of the critical information infrastructure itself easily leads to the conclusion that the assets involved are extremely precious. 

The above discussion reveals that all elements of risk associated with critical information infrastructure are rated as very high . Consequently, we can safely qualitatively assert that the risk itself is very high . This recognition leads inevitably to the conclusion that critical information infrastructure must be protected. Moreover, its protection is critical. The question then is how do we go about protecting critical information infrastructure Clearly, the answer to this question is multidimensional, ranging from policies to strategies to measures. In the next section we will attempt to answer the question at the policy and strategy levels. 

Complete and absolute security is a theoretical construction no information system can be made totally secure, unless it is locked in a room with no access at all and nobody is allowed to use it. On the other hand, security measures carry a cost, which is usually proportional to their effectiveness. Therefore, the best we can do is to secure information systems as best as possible within a given, finite, monetary budget. The purpose of all protection strategies is to reduce the risk that the information infrastructure is exposed to and, as some risk will always remain, to mitigate or accept this remaining risk. To do this, because the risk function is increasing in all its elements, one must reduce one, more, or all the elements of risk. As it is... 

SYSTEMIC CHALLENGES FOR CRITICAL INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION... 

Keywords Critical information infrastructure Critical Infrastructure Protection Security... 

This paper first discusses critical infrastructures, its relation with security concepts, and the features that are relevant for understanding the challenges they pose to society. Then, the critical information infrastructure is analyzed, with reflections on the requirements and constraint for its protection, and the... 

The web of links that connect the infrastructures expands at different levels technological as well as organizational—and most of the crucial connections are enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT). This set of underlying ICT systems is normally referred as the information infrastructure—which presents critical aspects in its own right, as well as being an essential service provider for the other infrastructures. 

The critical information infrastructure (CII) is a subset of the critical infrastructure, composed of the totality of interconnected computers and networks and their critical information flows [8]0, comprising therefore a vast range of components and systems, extending from hardware (satellites, routers), to software (operating systems, Internet protocols, databases), to data (DNS tables), to the processes and operations applied for running them [16]0. The CII includes typical information systems and telecommunications services, but increasingly now industrial systems (as for instance, the remote control of installations). 

G8 Principles for Protecting Critical Information Infrastructures, G8 Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs, May 2003... 

Personick S. D. and C. A. Patterson (eds.) Critical Information Infrastructure Protection and the Law An Overview of Key Issues, Committee on Critical Information Infrastructure Protection and the Law, National Research Council, USA, 2003... 

Keywords Dependability Information Infrastructure Structure Failures Malicious Faults Systems-of-Systems... 

Unfortunately the current less than satisfactory situation is likely to deteriorate as the global information infrastructure expands to encompass large numbers of huge networked computer systems, perhaps involving... 

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