| - Small system resilience |
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| Large companies have an inherent resilience by virtue of the number of
employees and computers on their premises. Small businesses and home-office
workers do not have such resources. One computer failure in the large company
might result in some disruption to the activities of several workers until the IT
department resolve the problem: the same computer failure in a small business can
stop all money-earning activities for a long period.
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| It is possible to build resilience into small business systems by
identifying the critical applications or computers and making sure that there is
an alternative method if a system fails. For example, if one office member takes
incoming phone calls and enters the order details into a computer, the information
on that computer could be frequently copied to a second computer. In the event of
the first computer failing, the second computer has the information to allow normal
business to continue while the faulty machine is repaired.
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| It is of course vital to ensure that each machine has spare capacity if it
is likely to be called upon to provide resilience. However, it is often possible to
use lower-specification computers where resilience is being planned in a system,
and there is little appreciable increase in cost. Two or three cheap P1 or P2 computers
can be joined together with a hub, and copies of the data stored on each hard disk.
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| Windows and Microsoft Office products do work well together when used in
such a configuration. One machine can have a tape drive or CD-burner to act as the
master backup machine. If that machine should fail, the cd-roms are still readable
in the other machines, or the tape drive can be transferred to a working machine to
access backed-up data when required, and the disruption to normal office activities
is minimised.
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| Sharing information between machines by publishing it on one machine and viewing
it on others is the first step to forming an Intranet, where information is
published in the same manner as on the World-wide-web, but using local networks
as the connections. Access time is quick, and access methods are by the standard
web-browser. PC's running Linux can access Windows files and printers, and make available their
own files and printers, using a freely-available system called Samba. Linux has
a good reputation for avoiding the problems associated with internet-borne viruses
and trojans that have plagued Windows machines around the world, and it makes
sense to use a machine running Linux to access the internet on behalf of the
remaining machines in the network, although Windows machines should still be protected
by a good virus scanner.
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In the case of Southwest Scimpart, the web-site acts as a buffer to allow
Scimitar owners to search the technical help pages to obtain possible answers to
their enquiries, or check on the existence and price of parts. If the web-site is
down for any lengthy period, the incoming phone calls increase, and start to
prevent sales calls from getting through. Ensuring that a second web-site is always
available is a cheap solution. It also allows the load to be shared between the
sites so that during normal operation (both sites up and running), loading on the
web-sites is unlikely to rise to the point where pages take a long time to load.
Similarly, having more than one e-mail account allows communications to continue
when an ISP's server fails.
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