We all want our systems to be secure and dependable, indeed the two topics are interlinked. Dependability requires high availability management, which has several aspects to it. We can try to achieve Fault Avoidance , with fault prevention and fault removal, but this isn't actually possible in all cases. For example, hard disk drives will have physical wear out due to moving parts, power supplies do not run indefinitely, etc. Therefore, we move towards Fault Acceptance . Fault acceptance relies on fault forecasting, to try to determine the most likely causes of faults, and fault tolerance to enable the system to continue functioning in the event of a fault. With fault tolerance we build redundancy into the system so that faults do not result in system failures. However, there are times when even our most fault tolerant systems will fail. What do we do then? Well, obviously we need to recover as quickly as possible. The 5 restoration phases of a system are as follows: Diagnosti...

Well, a couple of weeks ago I went to InfoSecurity Europe 2009 at Earl's Court, as I do every year. If you've never been, but are at all interested in network and information security or are looking for vendors, then I highly recommend visiting. To my surprise, and for the first time I can remember, Microsoft wasn't there. Apart from that, however, all the usual players were there and, to be honest, it was all much the same as before. There was no new emerging technology or hot topic, just new developments of old technologies. A couple of years ago we had the hot topic of 'social engineering' and 'securing the user'; ok, we all knew that the users were our weak link and phrases like "we spend all our time securing the first 2000 miles and forget about the last 2 feet", and "our network would be totally secure, reliable and fully functional if we didn't let users login", have always been commonplace, but there were new mass threats, n...