Systems Architecture

A 301 redirect is an HTTP response indicating that a resource has moved permanently and directing clients and crawlers to its new URL.

Agentic AI describes AI systems designed to pursue goals through iterative reasoning, planning, tool use, and adaptation rather than producing only a single passive response.

An AI agent is a software system that perceives context, reasons about a goal, selects actions, and uses tools or other systems to complete tasks with a defined degree of autonomy.

An AI management system is an organisation-wide set of policies, roles, processes, controls, and continual-improvement practices used to govern the responsible development, provision, and use of AI systems.

An API gateway is an intermediary that exposes, routes, secures, controls, and observes requests between API clients and backend services.

An application programming interface is a defined contract that allows software components to request data or functionality from another component.

An attack surface is the total set of reachable points, interfaces, identities, assets, and trust relationships that an attacker could attempt to exploit.

A canonical URL is the preferred representative URL for a set of duplicate or substantially similar pages.

Composable architecture is a modular approach in which systems are assembled from independent, interchangeable capabilities connected through defined interfaces.

Core Web Vitals are Google-defined user-experience metrics that assess loading performance, interaction responsiveness, and visual stability using real-world page data.

Crawlability is the extent to which search-engine crawlers can discover, request, render, and follow the pages and resources of a website.

A customer data platform (CDP) is packaged software that creates persistent, unified customer profiles and makes them available to other systems.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the strategy, processes and technology used to manage interactions and data across prospect and customer relationships.

Data observability is the ability to understand and diagnose the health, behaviour, and reliability of data across pipelines and platforms using metadata and telemetry.

A data pipeline is a sequence of processes that collects, moves, validates, transforms, and delivers data from one or more sources to target systems.

A data warehouse is a central analytical data store that integrates historical data from multiple sources for reporting, analysis, and decision support.

Encryption in transit protects data while it moves between systems by using cryptographic protocols that provide confidentiality and usually integrity and peer authentication.

Event-driven architecture is a design approach in which components produce, detect, and respond to events representing changes or occurrences in a system.

A text-based markup language for representing structured information with custom elements and hierarchical relationships.

Extract, Load, Transform is a data-integration pattern in which source data is loaded into the target platform before transformations are executed there.

Extract, Transform, Load is a data-integration pattern in which data is retrieved from sources, transformed into the required structure, and then loaded into a target system.

The standard markup language used to structure and describe content and semantics on web pages.

The application-layer protocol used for request-response communication between clients and servers on the web.

Idempotency is the property of an operation that produces the same intended state whether it is performed once or repeated with identical inputs.

Identity and Access Management is the discipline and supporting technology used to establish digital identities and control who or what can access specific resources under defined conditions.

Incident response is the coordinated process for detecting, analysing, containing, eradicating, recovering from, and learning from cybersecurity incidents.

Indexability is a page’s technical and policy eligibility to be included in a search engine’s index after it has been discovered and crawled.

Information architecture is the structural organisation and labelling of information environments to support usability, findability and understanding.

Integration Platform as a Service is a cloud-delivered platform for building, operating, and governing integrations among applications, data sources, APIs, and processes.

Interaction design is the design of how people act with, receive feedback from and move through products or services to achieve objectives.

Internal linking is the practice of connecting pages within the same website through hyperlinks that help people and crawlers discover and understand content.

ISO 31000:2018 is an international guideline for integrating risk management principles, a framework and a process into organisational governance and decision-making.

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is the international requirements standard for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system.

The first international standard specifying requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an AI management system within organisations.

JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight, text-based, language-independent format for exchanging structured data.

A knowledge graph is a structured representation of entities, their attributes and the relationships between them, organised for machine querying and reuse.

A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained on very large datasets and parameterised to process or generate language and related sequences.

LLM tokenisation is the conversion of text or other input into model-specific token identifiers that a large language model can process.

Middleware is software that provides shared communication, integration, data exchange, or platform services between applications and underlying systems.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the smallest product or experiment sufficient to test a defined customer hypothesis and generate validated learning.

OAuth 2.0 is an authorisation framework that lets a client obtain limited access to protected resources without requiring the resource owner to share credentials with that client.

Observability is the ability to understand a system’s internal state and behaviour from the telemetry and contextual information it produces.

An AI architecture that combines large language model generation with real-time retrieval from external knowledge sources to produce grounded, verifiable responses.

Robots.txt is a site-root text file that communicates crawler access rules under the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Role-Based Access Control is an access-control model in which permissions are assigned to organisational roles and users receive permissions through their role assignments.

Secrets management is the controlled creation, storage, distribution, use, rotation, revocation, and auditing of sensitive credentials used by people, applications, and infrastructure.

A formal agreement defining measurable service commitments, responsibilities, exclusions and remedies between a provider and customer.

The systematic monitoring and analysis of online conversations, mentions and signals relevant to an organisation, market or topic.

System integration is the practice of connecting applications, data stores, infrastructure, and business processes so they exchange information and operate as a coordinated system.

Technical debt is the future cost and constraint created when a technical solution is expedient now but requires additional correction, maintenance, or redesign later.

User experience is a person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the anticipated or actual use of a system, product, or service.

A user interface is the set of controls, content, feedback, and interaction mechanisms through which a person operates or communicates with a digital system.

Vendor lock-in is the condition in which switching from a provider, platform, or product becomes disproportionately difficult or costly because of technical, contractual, data, or operational dependencies.

Vulnerability management is the continuous practice of identifying, assessing, prioritising, remediating, and verifying weaknesses across systems, software, devices, and services.

Web accessibility means designing and developing websites and web tools so people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with, and contribute to them.

A webhook is an event-triggered HTTP request sent by one system to a registered endpoint in another system to notify it that something has happened.

Website cookies are small name–value records that a web server asks a user agent to store and return with eligible HTTP requests to maintain state.

A wireframe is a simplified representation of a screen or page that communicates structure, hierarchy, content placement, and intended interaction without production-level visual detail.

Workflow automation is the use of software to route information, apply rules, coordinate tasks, and trigger actions across a defined business process with reduced manual intervention.

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file that lists canonical URLs and optional metadata to help search engines discover and monitor a website’s indexable resources.

A security model that requires continuous verification of every user, device, and network flow — regardless of location — before granting access to resources.