Techniques for Disaster Tolerant Information Technology Systems

This paper provides a review of disaster tolerant Information Technology (IT). The state of traditional disaster recovery approaches is outlined. The risks of IT application downtime attributable to the increasing dependence on critical information technology operating in interdependent, interacting complex infrastructure systems is reviewed. General disaster tolerance techniques are summarized. While content specific approaches currently undertaken to understand and avoid cascading failures in systems are extant, opportunities exist to extend this complex systems independence analysis to the private business sector in the form of disaster tolerance. The high level of complexity of relationships between IT application availability and numerous secondary and tertiary affects of a disaster on systems that are dependent on other systems for availability has not yet been fully explored.