DATA PROTECTION
Single Points
of Failure
A Proactive, Organizational Approach
By DAVID BROWN
No doubt a recurring thought in your mind as a business leader is what to do when a critical system goes down. What happens to your client updates when you can’t access your regular lines of communication? How will
you convey critical information to your teams when you’re challenged by less-than-stellar conditions? When any situation occurs
that causes normal organizational operations to slow down or
grind to a halt, a “single point of failure” (SPOF) is often to blame.
SPOFs are anything that can cause an organization’s operations to temporarily cease or decelerate – they can exist in a hardware system, within a specific channel of communication or be
related to an individual person. Most importantly, they exist in
every organization.
For initial simple examples, organizations with one IT person or
no detailed documentation describing how the IT systems and environments are structured have an SPOF. It’s very difficult to react to
and recover from a failure when the IT person is out of the office or
if there’s no documentation to work from. Preventing an SPOF may
even cause another SPOF – an organization thinks they’re being
proactive by having multiple communication lines run from different vendors. Though they think they may have solved an SPOF by
having redundant systems, the organization doesn’t realize those
lines run through the same infrastructure. All of this said, though
organizations appear to be aware of SPOFs, they often are not.
Why are organizations unaware of SPOFs if they pose such a
threat? Perhaps it isn’t that organizations aren’t aware of SPOFs, but
that they’re not aware of the consequences that accompany SPOFs.
It’s very easy to tell someone how harmful a failure is after it happens, but it can be hard to persuade that person to identify those
consequences prior to the event. Often, organizations take an “it will
never happen to me” approach to failures, which is not only lackadaisical but potentially harmful or fatal to the firm’s bottom line.
Just as some individuals will not purchase insurance because they
don’t believe something harmful could happen to their house or car,
some organizations continue to believe SPOFs will not affect them.
As you’ve probably figured , the easiest way to identify SPOFs
is to wait until they manifest, but a proactive organizational
approach is more ideal than a reactive one. Running a business
impact analysis (BIA) is an effective proactive approach since it
looks at both the financial and qualitative impact that an SPOF can
create. Additionally, establishing monitoring systems helps make
sure that resources are being managed correctly, such as keeping
an eye on IT systems that manage critical parts of your organiza-
tion. Finding certain trends or warning signs before they become
full-blown points of failure is better than waiting for them to fail.
