3. Effect of failure

The reason that reliability is so important is that the effect of a system failure can be disastrous.

This is true for both businesses and the individual.

Personal effect

Consider your computer's hard disk failing right now as you are reading this.

"Where's my data gone!"

What effect would it have on you? For example, your computer may be holding all your family photographs going back years. Or it may contain your entire music collection or all your course work.

It makes sense to have some plans in place to deal with this situation.

Computer failure in a business

Consider a building society with thousands of mortgages managed on its computer system. A flood or fire breaks out in the data centre. Is it acceptable that all the data and records have gone?

Or the entire accounting system of a company has gone because of a failed server.

Such a scenario can destroy a company, so 'disaster recovery' plans need to be in place which are described in later pages.