Hardware may consist of a single laptop or multiple workstations linked to a remote server. Peripheral devices such as plotters and scanners may also make up the hardware requirements. The bigger the system the more likely it is able to have the necessary speed to respond to the needs in computing complex queries.
Software may include desktop, mainframe and web based solutions depending on the particular applications involved solving the problems of a specific organisation. These solutions may be running on a variety of operating systems such as windows, unix, linux or mac. The bigger the system the more likely there is for a requirement for a relational database solution such as Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL.