When you are confident that they will do what is expected of them
Effect of Failure
Personal Effect: Work lost, photographs lost etc.
Failure in a Business: e.g. A Building Society loses the mortgages managed as a flood/fire breaks out
into the data centre. Is this acceptable? This could destroy the company
Redundancy
It is a method of improving reliability
It means that critical parts of the system are duplicated so if a failure occurs,
the other sub-system can take over
e.g. Power supply may be duplicated. If the power begins to diminish,
the other power supply kicks in.
Data Redundancy
To duplicate the data in more than once place
within a computer system
It can be done by having two or more hard disks running in parallel and storing the same data.
If one fails, the other still works, no data is lost. The
broken disk is then swapped out for a new one.
Software Redundancy
More rare, but still used for critical programs which cannot afford to fail
The ideas is to have 3 software routines, each written by different coding
teams, producing the same output if given the same input
The computer uses a kind of voting system, and determines if one is
not getting the correct output, highlighting a bug in one of the codes.
Backing Up
Single Machines: It's a good idea to backup to an external hard drive.
Network Server: Back up to digital tape machines
replicating data of the remote server
Data Centre: Large organisation may have backed up far, far away. So a
fire/flood in the main centre won't destroy the backup
Cloud: Cloud Backup, Backup to the cloud duuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh