Intervention Scalability Assessment Tool: A decision support tool for health policy makers and implementers Full Text

Likewise, your business also benefits in the long run, with lower maintenance costs, higher agility, and cheaper upgrade expenses. Let’s say you have a basic anti-virus program, and it gained traction in the market. You can upgrade its security features and integrate other networks to increase its usability.

Finding excellent human resources and retaining them is part of scaling a business. An efficient business model gives them training in managing daily operations and the authority to carry them out. It also celebrates those with a track record of success in business development.

Translations of scalability

The ISAT provides a systematic way of identifying these gaps and assessing their relative importance. Table3 summarises existing frameworks, checklists and tools used for scaling up health interventions and difference between scalability and elasticity in cloud computing scalability assessment. The literature review revealed a number of existing frameworks, guides, checklists and tools (hereafter known as ‘frameworks’) to guide the scaling up of health interventions .

It may be that scalability might not be about your system, it might be about the scalability of a different system that wants to interface or leverage your system. Additionally, an IoT system might be designed with scalability as a basic requirement, but get the details wrong due to an incomplete perspective and appropriate use cases upon which to base assessments. Layer that is used for upward prediction of an EI- or EP-picture may be an I-picture, a P-picture, or the P part of a PB- or Improved PB-frame.

Honest, Objective, Lab-Tested Reviews

For software companies, a product’s popularity could mean adding millions of customers in few weeks’ time, scalability is a continuous and mission-critical challenge. The ability to scale the platforms is a key differentiator between long-lasting, successful enterprises and failed ventures. When potential investors evaluate a venture, one of their top concerns is if the venture has a product that would scale up. Hence, it is important that organisations must endeavour to bake the art of scalability into their product development DNA. Vertical scaling is when you increase the capability of a component, such as a server, to improve its performance.

Another attack is the classic distributed denial-of-service , in which an adversary gains control over multitudes of systems and devices and coordinates a flood of requests that effectively make a system unavailable. The basic elements of a secure system are authentication, authorization, and integrity. We need to ensure data cannot be intercepted in transit over networks, and data at rest cannot be accessed by anyone who does not have permission to access that data. Basically, I don’t want anyone seeing my credit card number as it is communicated between systems or stored in a company’s database. There’s a lot more to consider about scalability in software systems, but let’s come back to these issues after examining the scale of some contemporary software systems circa 2021. Scalability related to port speed is dependent on, among other things, the number of internal links, the level of parallelism, and the amount of buffer space supported by the fabric.

Connected Computing Environment

In fact, introducing some of the sophisticated distributed technologies I’ll describe in this book before there is a clear requirement can actually be deleterious to a project, with the additional complexity causing development inertia. Scalable is the term used in software engineering to describe software systems that can accommodate growth. In this chapter I’ll explore what precisely is meant by the ability to scale, known as scalability. I’ll also describe a few examples that put hard numbers on the capabilities and characteristics of contemporary applications and give a brief history of the origins of the massive systems we routinely build today. It is done by increasing the network’s storage, databases, and bandwidth capacity and supporting its physical extension to new development regions cost-effectively and sustainably.

• For example, an application program would be scalable if it could be moved from a smaller to a larger operating system and take full advantage of the larger operating system in terms of performance and the larger number of users that could be handled.
• The ISAT is designed to stimulate thinking and promote active consideration of the factors that have been shown to be important when assessing scalability.
• First, a basic anti-virus program can become premium and be used by enterprises through downloading certain add-ons or paying for subscription.
• But the Y-axis takes a long time to set up and is not very easy to implement.

The request load creates hotspots in the database when many requests try to access and update the same records simultaneously. This requires a schema redesign and subsequent reloading of the database, as well as code changes to the data access layer. The web server generates a lot of content dynamically and this reduces response time under load. A possible solution is to alter the code to more efficiently generate the content, thus reducing processing time per request. The second strategy for scalability can also be illustrated with our bridge example.

Assessing scalability has been identified as a fundamental step in any scaling up process , as it helps to avoid unnecessary expenditure of resources and efforts to scale up unsuitable interventions . Where scalability tools do exist, such as in Cooley et al.’s Scaling Up Management Framework, the scalability checklist is brief and does not provide a mechanism for evidence gathering or a process for the comprehensive and systematic assessment of scalability. Moreover, the Scaling Up Management Framework checklist was developed primarily for use in low- to middle-income country contexts and thus may have less utility in high-income countries. In order to achieve population-wide benefits and foster sustainable policy and programme development, health interventions found effective within controlled or research settings should be scaled up . Here, we refer to the process of ‘scale-up’ or ‘scaling up’ as “deliberate efforts to increase the impact of successfully tested health interventions so as to benefit more people and to foster policy and program development on a lasting basis” . However, there have been few documented examples of efficacious population health interventions being scaled up successfully in developed countries .

What are some common scalability patterns?

For example, cloud computing enterprises should search for platforms and tools that can provide a hybrid cloud in the most useable, consumable, and manageable manner. These are essential in finding a practical way possible to enhance the scalability of cloud computing. It is important to acknowledge that all the information that would ideally be required to assess the scalability of an intervention may not be available at the time the assessment is made. For example, it might not be possible to accurately determine how large the effect size at a population level needs to be to achieve a population health gain or how much the programme can be changed while still retaining fidelity and outcomes. Where there are gaps in the available evidence, decision-makers may need to consider information from other sources such as expert advice, practice-based knowledge or parallel evidence from similar programmatic interventions in other fields. Where no information is available, a judgement is required about how important the missing information is, whether any gaps can be addressed during implementation, or whether further research is required before scaling up can be recommended.

An example is a search engine, which must support increasing numbers of users, and the number of topics it indexes. Webscale is a computer architectural approach that brings the capabilities of large-scale cloud computing companies into enterprise data centers. “Approaching cloud computing with scalability in this context at front of mind should drive enterprises to look for platforms and tools that are capable of offering hybrid cloud in the most usable, digestible, manageable and essentially scalable way possible. Horizontal (scale-out) scalability connects multiple items in order to work as a single logical unit. For scale-out storage, this means adding devices in connected arrays or clusters. Each cluster can have many nodes , and nodes can be separated geographically.

Microservices don’t depend on each other to function, but they do need to be able to communicate with each other. Vertical scaling is easy to implement, saves money because you are not buying new resources, and easy to maintain. But, they can be a single point of failure that could result in significant downtime. Scaling on the Y-axis is defined by the splitting or segmentation of dissimilar components into multiple macro or micro services along verb or noun boundaries.

What is a Scalable Business?

Many open-source and even commercial scale-out storage clusters, especially those built on top of standard PC hardware and networks, provide eventual consistency only. Write operations invalidate other copies, but often don’t wait for their acknowledgements. Read operations typically don’t check every redundant copy prior to answering, potentially missing the preceding write operation. The large amount of metadata signal traffic would require specialized hardware and short distances to be handled with acceptable performance (i.e., act like a non-clustered storage device or database). In financial markets, scalability describes an institution’s ability to handle increased market demands; in the corporate world, a scalable company is one that can maintain or improve its profit margins while sales volume increases.

What Does Scalability Mean for Intel® Xeon Processors?

Companies with low operating overhead and little to no burden of warehousing or maintaining an inventory don’t need a lot of resources or infrastructure to grow rapidly. Andrew Milat led the conception of the project, study design, designed the review search strategy, drafting of the ISAT and writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed to ISAT drafting and interpretation and read and approved the final manuscript. Completing this tool does not negate the need for a comprehensive scale-up plan and/or implementation plan to be developed subsequent to a decision to scale up. Importantly, the information collected by the ISAT could also be used to inform the development of the forthcoming scale-up and/or implementation plan.

scalability

For example, some interventions may not be scalable to the population level despite showing effectiveness in controlled settings due to deficiencies in other important domains such as cost, workforce and sustainability. Completing the ISAT can also enable greater consistency when comparing across interventions competing for the same funds. The process of completing the ISAT itself may also promote learning in how to design programmes for at-scale implementation. This simple scenario illustrates how the dimensions of resource and effort costs are inextricably tied to scalability. If a system is not designed intrinsically to scale, then the downstream costs and resources of increasing its capacity to meet requirements may be massive.

Inflation is a decrease in the purchasing power of money, reflected in a general increase in the prices of goods and services in an economy. Scalability has become increasingly relevant in recent years as technology has made it easier to acquire more customers and expand markets globally. The project was supported by The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre .

Scalable companies tend to have an established group of leaders, including C-level executives, investors, and advisors, to provide strategy and direction for successful growth. Scalable businesses also have consistent brand messaging across their divisions and locations. A lack of brand enforcement sometimes causes companies to lose sight of their core value, thus decreasing scalability. After the company scaled up quickly, it lost sight of its core business and suffered as a result. Scalability, whether in a financial context or within the context of business strategy, refers to an organization’s ability to grow without being hampered by its structure or available resources when faced with increased production.

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End users mainly identified as mid-level policy-makers and came from state and/or local-based health organisations. Those identifying as Senior Executives indicated that they had been and/or are currently part of the decision-making capacity within their organisations on funding and scale-up of interventions. Data from interviews with respondents are described below under the themes of importance of decision support tools, when and how to use the ISAT, perceptions on the likely process required to complete the ISAT, additions to the ISAT and potential limitations.