Always-On Enterprise Information Systems for Always-On Business

Background: Downtime Points In Modern Business

Today's enterprises are exposed to several types of business risks coming from outside and inside the system. They implement information technologies in order to mitigate these risks. However, in the same time, the processes of implementing, using and managing information technologies bring some specific IT-related business risks as well: technical glitches, physical damages, natural disasters, system crashes, application bugs, operational mistakes, human errors, logical threats (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Major threats that cause downtime

Physical threats result from any kind of physical damage that may occur on IT centers, servers, hardware components, communication devices, etc. Natural-catastrophic event such as fire, lightning, flood, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, snow, can damage IT-centers and cause applications/data unavailability for some time. Logical threats may have different forms such as deleted system files, corrupted files, broken processes or programs, corrupted file system, crashed operating system. Technical glitches relate to the hardware component failures that may occur on computer components/devices within the IT infrastructure. Operating system crashes make all applications and data stored on enterprise servers unavailable. Application software defects, failures and crashes may have different forms such as bugs in programs, non-integrated or badly integrated applications, file corruptions. LAN/WAN/Internet problems, in addition to possible hardware glitches on data communication devices, include the problems such as those with Domain Controllers, Active Directory, DNS configuration files, DNS servers, network configuration files. Stanton (2005) stated that it can take less than 60 seconds for a company’s reputation to be ruined and its business to be crippled. Human errors comprise of accidental or intentional file deletion, unskilled operations, intentional hazardous activities including sabotage, strikes, epidemic situations, vandalism.

A number of IT-related problems that cause downtime may occur within all types of information architectures that are in use today. Some devices/locations at which a downtime may occur can be identified in both client/server and cloud-based information architectures (Figure 2).