There is an increasing reliance on network connectivity to support critical business functions. In this information age, the majority of business transactions are now conducted online. This dynamic has created an expectation of high-availability from a business perspective. The time when a business may have been able to get by with an entire day of downtime is no longer acceptable. Nowadays, a 2-hour outage is considered too long. Many organizations are running 24/7 operations and requiring a 99.9% uptime that is roughly 8 hours of downtime per year. A 99.999% up-time in comparison is approximately 5 minutes of downtime a year. One of the drives of 24/7 operations is the increase in mobile computing and VPN access. By providing employees with the ability to access corporate resources from their home or on their phone have created more reliance and demand for network connectivity.
Network reliability and availability are often used interchangeably but represent two different things. Reliability represents the probability that the system is operational within a time period without any failure, while availability represents the probability that the system will be operational when called upon in that instance of time (Mesbahi et al., 2018). High network reliability and availability comes with a cost. The greater the uptime, the greater the cost. When designing for reliability, its important to weigh the business needs against the cost. It is also critical to identify points of failure in your network architecture. This includes matters such as hardware, connectivity, power, human factor, and natural disasters. Once the critical components have been identified, you can then add redundancy to address single points of failure. Human factors can be mitigated through proper controls and processes.
The cloud offers a high percentage of uptime and reliability though it is still immune to outages. Research shows that Cloud service failures have resulted in approximately $285 million in losses (Mesbahi et al., 2018). This week, you uncover different strategies for implementing reliability to support 99.999% up-time in a 375-day per year operation. You will develop a presentation to support your design recommendations.
The CIO has reviewed the high-level design and has requested that you add redundancies to ensure the network is available 99.999% of the time (365 days per year operation). The issues you need to account for are power failure, inclement weather conditions, single cable or conduit failure, Internet connectivity, networking hardware, and server failures.
For this assignment, you will prepare a presentation for the CIO that covers the changes to the design you have made to support the desired network reliability. Your presentation should include the following:
High-level network design with added redundancy that supports 99.999% uptime
Estimation of the maximum hours of downtime that the company can expect in a given year to support its 99.999% uptime requirement. Show your calculation work.
Risk mitigation plan that takes into consideration these factors:
Power failure
Inclement weather conditions
Single cable or conduit failure
Internet connectivity
Hardware failure (network device, server)