Introduction

The concept of "location" within UAM is very important since it defines a crucial portion of the architecture—the Location aspect. This aspects, as noted, evolves from conceptual, to logical, to physical at the Business, Logical, and Technical levels of the architecture respectively.

This concept is very close to a "deployment" view of the architecture, but adds a great deal more information. Deployment is often simply focused on software and servers, whereas location in UAM covers many other aspects such as IT security, relationships between locations (i.e. communications), and network infrastructures.

Locations and Relationships

The Business Locations Model defines very general (conceptual) locations such as "ATM", "Bank Branch", or "Bank Headquarters". The activities or services provided at the locations are also described, along with relationships between them. Other aspects defined are "Domain" and "Zone", see: Term Definition: Logical Domain and Term Definition: Logical Zone. Also see: Whitepaper: A Reference Model for Enterprise Security.

Location diagrams illustrate how these aspects are partitioned and linked together to address the business requirements including IT security.  

Location descriptions include (depending upon the architecture level):

• Conceptual, logical or physical description of the location;
• Business activities and services provided at the location (the detail provided depending on the level);
• Non-functional aspects such as reliability, availability, performance, and capacity (depending upon the level);
• Management aspects, such as cost and risk (depending upon the architecture level).

Location relationships (links) are characterized by the following (depending upon the architecture level):

• Activities or services provided across the link;
• Link parameters, such as data rate, supported protocols, physical flow rate, security requirements, etc.;
• Management aspects, such as cost and technical risk.

As you move from the Business level to the Logical and Technical levels, computing concepts are added to the locations model, becoming more like traditional IP network models. Also, single localities can be refined into one or more nodes, or more than one locality can be mapped to a single node. Locations can represent quite disparate things, ultimately realized, for example, as a collection of hardware platforms, part of a computational resource, or groups of collaborating human resources. 

Location Diagrams

At the Business Level a location diagram is likely very simple, illustrating the main parts of the system under study, a complete Bank in this example:

The figure shows a simple Business Location Model for the enterprise, a bank. The bank has a headquarters, a number of ATMs, a Data Center, and Bank Branches. See: Guideline: Business Perspective Views.

At the Logical Level much more detail is provided, including computational aspects and IT security aspects:

This diagram illustrates that the enterprise has a Headquarters "Domain" protected by a Domain Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) with a Backbone network connecting it all together. This network is further defined in the diagram below: