Survivable functional units: balancing an enterprise’s mission and technology

Lawrence R. Rogers, CERT Training and Education Center, explains how this concept can help IT technicians understand their contribution to enterprise continuity.

INTRODUCTION
Enterprises strive for success in fulfilling their mission to their customers. Information and its management are key components of their ability to succeed. Computer systems and network infrastructure components – the technologies that process information – are playing an increasingly larger role in support of an enterprise’s ability to fulfil its customers’ needs. Their role has grown to a point where the slightest disruption–break-ins or even just attempted break-ins–can adversely affect the enterprise’s ability to manage information and
therefore deliver products and services to its customers.

While system administrators often need to focus on the details of those computer systems and network infrastructure components to keep them operating smoothly, they must also be able to see the role that these technologies play in support of the enterprise’s mission.

The concept of ‘survivable functional units’ is a way for system administrators to see more clearly the roles of the technologies they manage. The goal of survivable functional units is to group computer systems and network infrastructure components based on the functions provided by their constituent elements and then think, talk, and manage the enterprise network at this group level. By operating with these abstract groupings rather than the elements that make up the groups, system administrators can more easily focus on how the
mission of the enterprise is achieved through these groupings without becoming
unnecessarily bogged down or overwhelmed by specifics of the constituent elements.

Through this survivable functional unit abstraction, the system administrator reduces the complexity of the enterprise’s network so that he or she can more easily see its landscape, interrelationships and dependencies between the groups, and their contribution to the enterprise’s mission.

It’s a challenge for system administrators to group their computer systems and network infrastructure components into survivable functional units and then view them at the group level, given the pressures of time and the demands of technology. While short-term, technology-centred achievements are satisfying, they may not support the enterprise’s mission. Indeed, they may even be in opposition to that mission. System administrators need to balance the demands of technology with the enterprise’s need to satisfy its critical mission
objectives.

How does thinking about the enterprise network as a collection of interrelated survivable functional units benefit the system administrator? Said another way, why should they bother to change their way of thinking about how they view the computer systems and network infrastructure components that they manage?

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•Date: 28th May 2004 •Region: Worldwide •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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