Managing an IT application portfolio for your business is an essential step in maintaining business processes, and ensuring efficiency and quality. However, before you begin working on the management aspect of the portfolio, it is important to understand exactly how IT applications interact with databases and operating systems.
As an established business, you may already know that programs, software, hardware and operating systems work in unison to bring results and execute functions. In the simplest terms, a program can be defined as a set of instructions, which is relayed through the operating system to the hardware.
Applications and the operating system
An operating system manages everything including memory, database, applications, devices, hardware, and software. In a nutshell, the average OS can be divided into hardware, device drivers, input/output management, applications, CPU management and memory management. Providing a stable platform for IT applications to work, operating systems build a bridge between software programming and hardware execution. It provides a consistent interface for applications, allowing you to write applications necessary to manage your business’ IT portfolio.
Applications and the database
A database is defined as a collection of data or information that is manually or automatically organized, updated, managed and accessed for business processes. A database server on the other hand is a program or application that allows computers to operate and manage this information. You can use a number of computer software programs to manage information, as well as IT applications on your database. These programs are available either commercially like Oracle and MSSQL or through open source i.e. MySQL, PostgresSQL or MongoDB. Database servers use many storage techniques called engines and work in different manners.
Interaction between hardware and software
The connection between the user, application, operating system and hardware is simple. Software can be divided into three types i.e. operating systems, BIOS as well as application software. In unison, these three types of software ensure that the hardware functions properly and provides necessary results.
The user first interacts with the IT application with a set of statements. This data is then relayed to the input/output system that sends the instructions to the operating system. After the OS has comprehended the commands, it translates this information into binary language (consisting of 1s and 0s) to the BIOS. Eventually, the BIOS then translates these codes and provides instructions to the hardware. After the functions have been completed, the results are relayed in the opposite order until the user finally reads the output and enters the next command.
