G 0.25 Failure of Equipment or Systems

When time-critical applications are operated on an IT system, the consequential damage following a system failure is correspondingly high if there are no fallback options.

Examples:

• A firmware is installed in an IT system that was not intended for that system type. The IT system then fails to start properly and must be made operational again by the manufacturer.
• At an Internet Service Provider (ISP), a power supply failure in a storage system caused it to be shut down. Although the actual failure could be quickly fixed, the affected IT systems could not be restarted afterwards because inconsistencies occurred in the file system. As a result, several web servers operated by the ISP were unreachable for days.