Finding out the "what-if's" - Enterprise Architecture & Mission Criticality

When 13 years ago Marc Andreessen noted that "Software is eating the World", Enterprise (IT) Architecture was a field that dealt mostly with contextual and conceptual models. Much has changed since then, and with it the role of an Enterprise Architect. With a broad understanding across business, data, apps and infra, the excellent sectorial knowledge, abilities to abstract, to think conceptually, seeing the bigger picture and their designing skills, Enterprise Architect are excellent at finding out "what-if".

Mission critical design is getting mainstream

Designing mission critical solutions has been a rather niche field. As an IT Architect during the 1990s and early 2000s it was special to be working on a mission critical system and you had to be working on the design of a submarine or a nuclear power station to deal with mission criticality. With the advent of the internet and the cloud, as well as technology advances, technology is far more pervasive than before and designing mission critical solutions is becoming more common. As our day-to-day lives depends increasingly on technology IT, outages can affect us directly and almost instantly.

For instance, the CrowdStrike outage on the 19th July 2024 which caused an airport in Switzerland to cancel all takeoff and landings, a hospital in Germany to cancel all non-urgent surgeries or a retailer in UK being unable to sell items as the POS is not working. In the end, it was a failed update of a “below” OS (operating system) security component that rendered a Windows device inoperable, as it was not able to start without an operator being physically present.

Another example was the outage that British Airways experienced in 2017 during one of the busiest travel weekends in the United Kingdom. It grounded 672 flights, all caused by a data centre power failure. A cyber-attack on?a UK software and managed service provider?took down patient management software as well as the NHS 111 call services in 2022. And so, the list of outages that impacts end users directly goes on.

Why EAs are important

Going back to the 2000s the field of experts in mission criticality was small and often reserved to engineers or design experts. Enterprise Architects were typically not involved in high level design work as most of us were busy developing conceptual models, enterprise-wide plans and high-level business cases. Seldom would an Enterprise Architect be dealing with outage scenarios or considering what high availability solution would need to be considered. Yes, some of us did. However, the majority did not, and it is my view that Enterprise Architects must get much more involved in the process of designing mission critical solutions.

There are several reasons: for one, Enterprise Architects have skills across business, data, apps and infra. They have excellent sectorial knowledge and understand how IT can deliver real value to the business. Secondly, Enterprise Architects have great abilities to abstract, to think conceptually, seeing the bigger picture. And thirdly, Enterprise Architects are great designers. They understand how to engage with all stakeholders, whether business or technical and understand how to choose the best options.

Enterprise Architects are important when it comes to designing mission critical solutions.

A question of scope

Let’s take an example: a credit card payment system. As we are depending more and more on non-cash transactions (our own CRI report found that non-cash payments will increase 15% year on year) ensuring that a credit card payment system of a bank is available becomes increasingly critical.

Looking at the end2end process of a payment system multiple steps must typically be completed to successfully complete a transaction (unless the amount is higher than the floor level set by the retailer). Along the process steps is the physical card reader, the local USB, Bluetooth, LAN connection to the MAN or WAN connection to the payment gateway, which in turn has a connection to the banks system to then connect with the credit card exchange and then eventually with the credit card provider.

As noted in the diagram above, a lot can go wrong. From connectivity issues, power issues, outages and disruptions, to hardware failure and human errors. What can be tricky is to relate these to causes, predicting them, and to find cost effective solutions to mitigate each. The reason why it is tricky is because the potential field of outage scenario and related mitigation solution is wide, covering not just technical aspect but also people and process related aspects. And this is where an Enterprise Architect can deliver real value: working with all stakeholders an Enterprise Architect can facilitate the activities to assess the landscape using “what if” scenarios covering business, process, application and cloud/infrastructure related subjects.

Summary

The progress of technology into all aspects of our day-2-day life has provided society with more and more opportunities. However, this also means that an IT outage can affect society directly. Designing IT solutions that can withstand various outage scenarios is now also an area where Enterprise Architects should provide their experience and expertise, ensuring that we considered all “what-if” scenarios.

References:

1 https://hbr.org/2023/05/the-devastating-business-impacts-of-a-cyber-breach

2 https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/business-plans/business-plan-2017-18.pdf

3 https://www.fintechfutures.com/2021/02/

4 https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/google_london_outage_incident_report/

5 https://www.businessinsider.com/

6 https://softwaremill.com/bad-software-examples-how-much-can-poor-code-hurt-you/

7 https://blog.usecure.io/the-role-of-human-error-in-successful-cyber-security-breaches

8 Capgemini World Payment Report 2023

9 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/11/

10 Hospitals, banks, media, airlines hit by major IT outage - BBC News