In the IT world, something exists that workers call a “single point of failure.” It’s an ominous term, but not one that’s as catastrophic as it sounds. However, if a single point of failure becomes an issue, it can slow a company down or even force it to temporarily grind to a halt.
Since single points of failure can disrupt your business, they’re worth talking about if your company has anything to do with IT. In this article, we’ll define single points of failure, and then we’ll identify five of the most common ones that can occur. We’ll also get into how your company can most easily avoid them.
What Does Single Point of Failure Actually Mean?
Let’s say for a moment that you have a company with some IT involvement. It would be hard to envision a business entity that does not need IT at least a little. Even if you have only minimal online activity, simply running a website requires some degree of IT expertise.
Single point of failure means that something failed within the general or broad confines of your IT system. When it did, it caused a total system shutdown.
As you can imagine, having something that counts as a single point of failure can become problematic pretty quickly. What’s truly alarming, though, is that many companies have not one single point of failure, but many. They may not know about them until the worst actually happens and the network or their operation goes down.
The Weakest Link Comparison
Some individuals in the IT world call a single point of failure the weakest link. If there are many interconnected pieces that make up a company’s online capabilities as a whole, a single point of failure, or weakest link, if you want to call it that, can prove disastrous if someone utilizes it for nefarious purposes.
While you might think of hackers taking advantage of a single point of failure, incompetence can just as easily cause a system shutdown from this type of source. That’s why having backup plans or redundancies in place makes sense.
Now that you know about single points of failure in a more general sense, let’s talk about some of the particular ones that often prove the most problematic for companies of all kinds.
Human Error
As with any issue that a company might encounter, it’s best we start by talking about human error. A human might do something that turns them into an instant single point of failure. For example, they might accidentally delete some crucial data that the company didn’t back up. They may enter some incorrect credentials. Perhaps they’ll misconfigure a system.
Redundancies in the system can help you to guard against this as a company. You can also make sure to train your workers well. You will want to teach your employees not to open phishing emails, to change their passwords often, and to follow password complexity guidelines.
Network Connectivity
Network connectivity can become a single point of failure if you have one critical component in the system that fails, and it causes network connectivity to go down. For example, maybe you have a central switch that someone trips, a primary router that malfunctions, or an internal service provider connection that suffers a fundamental breakdown.
Again, having redundancies in place can go a long way toward stopping this from happening. Also, you can avoid having centralized dependence. Single ISP reliance is also a mistake. If you have multiple internet service providers, then you can fall back on another option if your primary one stops working for a lengthy period of time.
Load balancing should also help you. This involves having load balancers distribute your network traffic across multiple network connections and servers. That way, you won’t see any overload at a single point.
Hardware Failures
A hardware failure can certainly represent a single point of failure. When that happens, it usually means you’re putting too much trust in a single piece of hardware, like a server.
You never want to have one piece of server hardware that controls virtually everything that’s happening within your network. Even someone who’s just starting to learn about IT will tell you the same thing. Having backup systems, redundancies, and load balancing will also prevent this from happening.
Power Outages
You can easily see how a power outage might represent a single point of failure for your business entity. If your power goes out, then the whole system goes down. It will likely remain that way until your power company takes steps to fix the problem.
If you have a system that utilizes a single power source, you’re asking for trouble. Once again, you want to have redundancies in place that can immediately restore power if your normal source goes down.
Having a generator on the premises makes sense, assuming you have a physical office space. You might also choose to set up power alerts and monitoring.
This way, you should have ample warning before anything goes wrong. You can fall back on a different grid or a use a generator till the situation stabilizes.
Software Failures
If you have some critical software that is part of your system, and it stops working, then you will lose the entire system until you can come up with a fix or a workaround. Backup measures and redundancies can help you, but you will also want to have robust security measures in place so that hackers can’t easily access your system.
You might think that if you own a small company or you don’t have many competitors that no one will try to crash your system. Some hackers look for vulnerabilities not for industrial espionage purposes, but just because they like wreaking havoc.
You should keep this in mind when you set up any software suite that controls much of your company’s functionality. Hiring ethical hackers who can probe your system for weaknesses makes sense.