EUIST

Resilience describes the ability of communications networks in providing and maintaining acceptable level of service in the face of various challenges to normal operations.

More and more we live in world where the use of information and communication technology is part of our daily lives. Hence dependability and network resilience is becoming ever more important for all of us. We began our series with an introductory post here:
Dependability of public e-communication networks – ropes to skip – introduction

Today we continue with challenge nr. 1:

1) Setting the dependability rules

Too many issues in estimation of the appropriate level of dependability and resilience of public e-communication networks involve judgment and subjectivity (e.g., what is a threat, private versus public network, financial impact of a disaster).
Both the resilience target and the content of the resilience target are arbitrary. The question that must be asked is:

“Does the regulatory framework and its implementation imply a higher level of dependability and resilience of public e-communication networks tomorrow than we experience today (see also Point 6 coming up in a future post).”

Challenge: Too many subjective issues about resilience or dependability of public e-communications networks involve people whose careers depend on pleasing ministers to make the assessment.

As well, competitive markets may not provide infrastructure owners with the long-term incentives needed to invest in dependable and reliable e-communication networks.

As last week’s London Stock Exchange outage taught us, however, the difficulty is in defining what systems are critical. As well, what is considered resilient may not be considered to meet that criterion by another party.

LSE outage – five lessons for achieving better network dependability

Interpretations are subjective and as the LSE trading platform was down, the opportunity cost of being unable to trade may have been somewhat down as well because of the current stock market chitters (i.e. the sacrifices in forgone profits are lower when opportunities are less plentiful). What can be done and what the LSE is willing to do for reducing the likelihood of such a shut-down from happening again is unclear.

In the LSE case, whatever regulatory framework was used (telecom, financial markets), the LSE trading network does not appear to be part of the public e-communcations networks regulated by Ofcom (the telecom regulator in Britain).

The amount of money involved with the trades executed on the LSE board as well as its importance for financial markets is considerable. In turn, one wonders if the TradElect proprietary platform that handles transactions for the LSE and the e-communications networks for traders used to participate in this market is not a critical part of the country’s infrastructure.

UK stakeholders as well as the financial market participants should address this and find a way to define what level of dependability is involved and the level of resilience required. We await a speedy solution but don’t hold your breadth.