… redundancy does not equal resilience

Redundancy is one of the things that an organisation must invest in if it serious about the journey to resilience. However, they are not the same thing.

Redundancy is essential in the Technology space (in terms of the People, Process, Technology model). And I would include most of a firm’s Infrastructure into this category.

Particularly in the IT space there is a great focus on redundancy. Whether that is to increase availability of a service, or to expedite fast recovery in the event of a disaster.

The real problem here is that redundancy is a really expensive strategy to improve resilience. It is also not applicable to all areas of a business.

Lean manufacturing and supply chain processes cannot afford the luxury of building redundancy into their operations – and these are the trends that are being adopted around the world.

Likewise just investing in the redundant plant/equipment will not help if all instances of the technology/infrastructure are impacted by the same incident.

• Concentration of operations into large facilities generates economy of scale, but is “concentration risk” listed in the risk universe used by your Risk Management process?

Consider the value of this (real world) proposed investment in redundancy;

• splitting IT operations over two Data Centres (to improve availability)
• in a region where there is only a single feed available from the national electricity grid
• when your Telco (Wide Area Network) provider has only a single point of presence in the region
• and the Data Centres are connected via an unmanaged, non-redundant, network.

Redundancy – in people, process and technology. Redundancy that is properly designed, built, maintained and tested to verify that it works.

On the weekend I was at a concert that featured a Scottish band called The Proclaimers (best not to ask why) – redundancy is a start … “I’m on my way from misery to happiness …”