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STUDY GUIDE · GKU 3

Information systems technology study guide (Information Systems)

This unit is about the technology an organisation runs on and how to keep it safe, seen from the seat of the analyst or manager who has to choose, size, pay for and defend it. The first half covers infrastructure: the components of an IT infrastructure and how tiers, redundancy and capacity planning decide whether a service stays up; physical, virtual and cloud servers and how to compare their total cost; enterprise architecture and the ways systems are integrated (point-to-point, hub or bus, services and APIs); layered network architecture and protocols; addressing, subnets, VLANs and wireless configuration; and the firewalls, DMZs, VPNs and intrusion detection that protect the whole. The second half is secure computing: what cryptography can and cannot promise, identity and access control and the human side of security, and how threats are assessed as risks and governed by laws and standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, the NCA Essential Cybersecurity Controls and the PDPL. Every section opens with a quick-revision card; the computable parts (availability, capacity, cost, transfer time, subnets, keys, loss expectancy) are taught with worked examples from easy to exam level, and the descriptive parts with decision examples.

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Structured by the official ETEC subject standard for this topic: every listed topic and learning outcome, with formulas, figures and worked examples. The full sections are available to members in the app.

SKU 3.1 · Information technology infrastructure

  1. Infrastructure design: components, tiers, availability and capacity

    What an IT infrastructure is made of, client/server and peer-to-peer designs, how multi-tier architectures separate presentation, logic and data, and how to compute the availability of chained and redundant components and the number of servers a growing load needs.

  2. Server architecture: physical, virtual and cloud

    Physical servers, virtualisation and containers, the NIST cloud model (characteristics, IaaS/PaaS/SaaS, deployment models) with its split of responsibilities, and how to compare physical and cloud options by host count and total cost of ownership.

  3. Enterprise architecture and systems integration

    Enterprise architecture as the organisation-wide plan for business, data, applications and technology (TOGAF and Zachman by name), and the ways its systems are joined: point-to-point links, hubs and service buses, SOA and microservices, APIs over REST or SOAP with JSON or XML, and ETL versus application integration.

  4. Layered network architecture, protocols and transfer time

    Why networks are built in layers, the OSI and TCP/IP models, encapsulation and peer-layer communication, which device works at which layer, the common application protocols and their ports, TCP versus UDP, and how long a transfer takes once headers are counted.

  5. Network configuration: addresses, subnets, VLANs, wired and wireless

    What every host must be configured with (address, mask, gateway, DNS) and how DHCP supplies it, subnetting and VLSM, private addresses and NAT, VLANs and inter-VLAN routing, wired versus wireless design, and how to diagnose a host that reaches its own subnet but nothing else.

  6. Securing the organisational infrastructure

    Defence in depth applied to an organisation's network: firewalls and their rule order, the DMZ, segmentation with VLANs and ACLs, network- and host-based intrusion detection and prevention, VPNs, wireless and endpoint hardening, logging and backups, and how to critique an infrastructure that lacks them.

SKU 3.2 · Secure computing

  1. Data security and cryptography

    What cryptography is for in data communications and storage: symmetric and public-key encryption, hashes, message authentication codes (MACs) and digital signatures and which security goal each meets, key management, how passwords should be stored, and how to design software that meets stated security requirements.

  2. Human and organisational security: identity, access and awareness

    Identification, authentication, authorisation and accountability; authentication factors and MFA; access-control models (discretionary DAC, mandatory MAC, role-based RBAC, attribute-based ABAC) and the principles of least privilege and separation of duties; social engineering and awareness; social-media privacy; and protecting the devices people carry.

  3. Cyber threats, risk assessment, laws and standards

    The main families of cyber threat and the prevention strategy for each, the risk-management steps for information assets, quantitative loss expectancy and the value of a control, prioritising risks, and the laws and standards that govern an organisation's security: ISO/IEC 27001 and 27002, NIST CSF, PCI DSS, the NCA ECC and the PDPL.

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