System Risk visualization and mitigation methodology and its application to ICT system failures

Abstract

A method is presented for mitigating system failures. Current state-of-the-art methodologies and frameworks have strength as a common language to understand system failures holistically with various stakeholders. On the other hand there is a shortcoming in quantitative aspects. This is major obstacle to assess effectiveness of various measures to mitigate system risk. In order to overcome this shortcoming, this paper express system risk numerically through a coupling and an interaction factors between system configuration elements as well as system failures frequency rate, this three numerical number (i.e. coupling, interaction and frequency) create three dimensional space, and measuring its trajectory through time visualize system risk trends which are the targets to create an effective preventative measures to system failures. A root cause of a system failure is discovered by using a System Dynamics technique to a trajectory of a system risk location, then based upon the root cause, the effective counter measures are extracted. Lastly this methodology is applied to the system failures cases with various ICT systems and counter measures are extracted. An application example of ICT system failures exhibits the effectiveness of this methodology.