D1 - Examine the impact of potential faults

Explain the impact of one fault from each of the areas below:


Servers

The mail server has failed to function due to a software error – If the mail server that is used for the entire organisation suddenly stops working, this means that every single employee in the office would be unable to send/receive emails. In many cases, this would mean that the amount of work that they are able to do is limited as they may be relying on email for specific things. Updating or patching the software that has caused this failure to occur could take a long time, which would have a huge effect on a company that are already operating on a tight schedule. This period of time could be extended if the issue isn’t fixed by simply applying an update to the software causing the fault. If the software needs to be reinstalled, this could take hours or even days to perform the install, costing the company even more time. If all else fails and the server needs to be replaced, this could affect the company on a monetary level as a replacement mail server will cost a lot of money that will heavily impact the company’s limited budget.

Internet

The internet connection has been accidentally dug up breaking the fibre cable – If the fibre cable that connects the building to the network has been damaged, then obviously the computers being used by employees will be unable to connect to the Internet. On top of this, the servers that provide email and host the company’s website will also be offline. The impact that all of this has is that people are unable to access emails or files that are stored on the server, delaying the time it takes for work to be completed. If their webserver is down, then it will affect customer’s attempting to access the newspaper website, this could affect the company negatively by damaging their reputation as potential clients will remember that they had problems with access to their website. Replacing the fibre-optic cabling will be very costly, thus impacting the budget that the organisation has.

Individual PC Issue

A NIC inside the receptionists PC has failed – If the Network Interface Controller for the receptionist’s computer has encountered a hardware problem and is no longer working, than the receptionist will be unable to connect their PC to the network. The impact that this will have is that they cannot read their emails, meaning that any important updates to the operation of the business will be missed, and they may have to manually make a record of any interactions that take place at the office. As well as time and efficiency being affected, the NIC card will have to be replaced with a model of the same specification so that it is compatible with the same PC. This will obviously affect the budget of the company (even if it is minimal) as they will have to pay for the hardware replacement.