Information Assurance

4.2. Prevention Techniques

Prevention techniques focus primarily on improving component and system reliability in order to reduce the occurrence of faults. Prevention techniques can be technical or nontechnical in nature. Examples of technical prevention techniques are the use of fault-tolerant hardware architectures in switch/router designs, provisioning backup power supplies at network equipment, and predeployment stress testing of software to name a few. Examples of nontechnical prevention techniques [20] are providing physical and electronic security for networking infrastructure, call-before-you-dig regulations to reduce the likelihood of cable cuts, formal training for network maintenance personnel, and regular scheduled maintenance.