- [Narrator] Business continuity professionals
have a variety of tools at their disposal
to help remediate potential availability issues.
One of the critical ways that IT professionals
protect the availability of systems
is ensuring that they are redundant.
That simply means that systems are designed
in such a way that the failure of a single component
doesn't bring the entire system down.
Business can continue in the face
of a single predictable failure.
The single point of failure analysis process
provides security professionals with a mechanism
to identify and remove single points of failure
from their systems.
Let's look at an example.
Here we have a simple web-based application,
a web server protected by a firewall
and connected to the internet.
As we conduct a single point of failure analysis,
we might first notice that the web server itself
is a single point of failure.
If anything goes wrong with the server,
the web service will stop functioning.
We can correct the situation by replacing
the single web server with a clustered farm
of servers that are all designed to provide web services.
The cluster is designed so that if a single server fails,
the other serves may continue providing service
without disruption.
Once we've implemented the cluster,
we've removed the server as a single point of failure.
Next, we might turn our attention to the firewall,
another single point of failure in this scenario.
If the firewall goes down,
internet users will not able to reach the web server,
rendering the web service unavailable.
Therefore, the firewall is also a single point of failure.
We can correct the situation by replacing
the firewall with a pair of high availability firewalls
where one serves as a backup device
standing by to step in immediately
if the primary firewall fails.
By replacing the single firewall
with a high availability pair
we have removed the firewall
as a single point of failure.
But we still have yet another single point of failure here,
the internal and external network connections.
As with the web server and firewall,
we can the single point of failure
by introducing redundancy
and having two separate network connections for each link.
If one fails, the service may continue to operate
over the other.
This single point of failure analysis
may continue on, identifying and remediating issues
until either the team stops finding new issues
or the cost of addressing issues
outweighs the potential benefit.
Single point of failure analysis
is an important part of an organization's
continuity of operations planning efforts.
Organizations should also consider
the other risks facing their IT operations.
As they conduct IT contingency planning,
they should not only consider single point of failure
but also all of the other situations
that might jeopardize business continuity.
For example, these might include
the sudden bankruptcy of a key vendor
or the inability to provide computing
or storage capacity needed by the business,
or even utility service failures,
or any other risk that IT management
believes may disrupt operations.
One final component of business continuity planning
that is often overlooked
is personnel succession planning.
Information technology depends upon
highly skilled team members who develop,
configure, and maintain systems and processes.
IT leadership should work with human resources
to identify those team members
who are essential to continued operations
and identify potential successors for those positions.
That way, when someone leaves the organization,
management has already thought through
potential replacements and hopefully provided
those successors with the professional development
opportunities they need to step
into the departing employee's shoes.