"An information outage is becoming the corporate equivalent of a heart attack. The risk of such outages is rapidly increasing because there is an unrecognized and growing divergence between end-user requirements for information availability and the limitations of the physical facility and its environmental infrastructure to support uninterrupted computer operation. Ten years ago, site reliability problems accounted for just 3% of total downtime. Today it is up to 10%, and by 1995, I project that site malfunctions will account for 20% to 30% of total processing downtime.

"Reversing these trends requires top management to redirect resources, but not necessarily to spend more money. This paper explores current problems and develops a conceptual framework and strategy for the management, organization, and engineering steps required to make the facility and its environmental infrastructure more reliable and fault tolerant."