Tackling system failures needs new paradigm

IN AN era where minimising service disruptions are of prime importance to businesses, the system failure which caused the disruption of trading on Singapore Exchange last week was an unfortunate event. The reality is that, despite the vast IT investments made by big businesses, service disruptions continue to happen. Human error and information technology glitches are commonly cited as reasons for service disruptions and inconveniences.

Extracting comprehensive information from these data centres is a staggering challenge. One would imagine that there are conceivable solutions to plug any potential service disruptions by big businesses to society. But the truth is that these systems will continue to fail, even in this day and age. Given our imperfect world, the overriding consideration should be: If my organisation's critical systems fail, how long would it take to recover it and normalise services? In this regard, organisations have to keep in mind three prime considerations to ensure the system can get back up quickly and enable the public to use services with minimal inconvenience.

The first relates to the resilience of the organisation's IT system. The underlying notion here is whether the system infrastructure is available continuously in real time and can tolerate system failures. To ensure resilience, the organisation needs to review the functionality, as well as the scalability, of its systems periodically to ensure optimal performance all the time. The key to building resilience is to have a solution that "strings" all IT components together. To achieve this requires a new paradigm in managing information to ensure service continuity.