Download Maintenance, security and resilience

Unit 8
Maintenance, security
and resilience
The term “sustainability” generally means the ability of a system to
continue to function. In practice we must not only consider the ability to function, it's the ability to function even when external events
are destabilising the system. Just like natural ecosystems, what a truly
sustainable system must embody is not just the ability to work, but to
continue to work after events have caused temporary interruptions or
problems. This characteristic is called resilience,1 and it's a feature that
can be designed into the way we build and use computer technology.
This section looks at resilience of information systems in the broadest
sense, considering how the equipment is used, how the hardware is
maintained, and how the software is configured to maximise security.
The objective of this process is to protect our information resources,
and the machines that we use to access and manipulate them. That
requires that we consider everything from how we define our needs
and plan the system, the organisation of physical security, protection
against malware and other system failures, right down to basic security measures such as passwords and access controls.
In many ways this section is all about combining all the actions covered
in previous sections into a single, integrated method of managing our
need for technology. Rather than separating different issues and looking at them in isolation we need to develop an integrated approach to
system resilience and security, trying to minimise the ecological impacts of our demand for IT, and to refine the elements that make the
system function to produce the optimal solution to our needs.
1. Wikipedia, 'Resilience (ecology)'. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience_(ecology)