Originally used to refer to the large windowed rooms that contained an enterprise's
mainframe computers and other
hardware devices necessary for data storage and processing, today the term refers generally to the centrally administered computing environments of enterprises. As computers have gotten smaller and can be fit into smaller spaces, they are no longer housed in centralized rooms surrounded by glass windows as they were as early as the 1950s. However, the terms
glass house is still used to describe an enterprise's centrally controlled computing environment.
