When More Is Too Much

The London Stock Exchange suffered an outage today and while the details are a little sketchy, it seems that excessive trading brought the system down, or at least some part of the system - and here lies the problem. Systems are increasing in complexity and the interrelationships are becoming less and less understood. The result - an outage in a minor application can bring the whole system to a standstill.

Companies cannot afford to overlook the infrastructure on which their IT runs. If the IT becomes more complex, for example using virtualization or Service Oriented Architecture or third party service providers then these have to be included in Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plans. DR/BC plans are often not tested frequently enough - with one of the reasons being given that ‘it will effect the customer’… well, at least in a test you get to choose the date and time. Friday’s at 8pm is a good time to start, or Saturday at 10am after the end-of-week tasks have completed… that way, when it doesn’t go to plan, you have another 24 hours to sort it out.

So… once more, revisit those DR/BC plans and schedule a test and make sure it includes all the 3rd parties as well. How well would your infrastructure cope if you had a 100% increase in demand… twice the business or none at all?

September 8, 2008 | Filed Under disaster recovery 

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