The term redundancy is hardly ever used as a positive term or in a positive context. Generally speaking, redundancy refers to an unnecessary repetition or copy of something and has connotations of beating around the bush, especially where writing and speech are concerned.

But let’s forget about that for a moment. From a purely business operations point of view, redundancy is one of the best and most reliable ways to ensure the soundness of your critical infrastructure. It helps ensure your networks are running the way they should: free of any disruption.

With people’s patience for downtime continually wearing thin and its costs constantly on the rise, organizations need to make sure that they are minimizing downtime as much as possible. Thanks to redundant systems, you can ensure that downtime, both planned and unplanned, isn’t as big of a headache as it would be otherwise. But that’s not all; redundant systems provide organizations with a host of other benefits.

What Is System Redundancy?

System redundancy refers to the duplication of critical components and infrastructure that can be used as a fallback in case of failure with the primary critical infrastructure. These backup systems are known as redundant systems.

Types Of Redundancy

System redundancy is classified into three main categories:

• Hardware Redundancy: This is the duplication of critical hardware assets such as servers and data centers. It can also include duplication of power sources and network components.
• Software Redundancy: This involves running different copies or instances of software that is critical to the infrastructure on various devices and servers.
• Data Redundancy: This refers to making multiple copies of critical data and storing it in different locations within the same storage system or even a different storage system entirely.

How Does System Redundancy Help?

Increased Reliability

Redundant systems function as a backup for your critical infrastructure. This means you have assets and other systems in place that are primed and ready to take over promptly in case of failure in your primary asset infrastructure, greatly enhancing your fault tolerance. This is an especially effective way to ensure your systems are operating as intended, even when there is a failure. Redundant systems can significantly reduce downtime and ensure uninterrupted business continuity.

Improved Performance

Redundant systems don’t exist to serve merely as backups. Implementing redundancy into your critical infrastructure provides you with a lot more resources to work with. This enables you to improve performance by spreading the workload across multiple devices during periods of heavy load, resulting in reduced latency and optimal performance levels.

Where network performance is concerned, redundant systems provide a great solution to the problem of network brownouts (also known as unusable uptime). When downtime occurs, it often results in periods of greatly reduced performance, even after the network is up and running again. Network brownouts are among the biggest, albeit often overlooked, threats faced by IT organizations.

Disaster Recovery

Having redundant systems in place can greatly aid organizations with disaster recovery. We’ve already discussed how these systems allow you to quickly bounce back even when there is a failure in your critical infrastructure. Data redundancy, in particular, can enable you to quickly recover from a situation where you lose critical data either due to a malfunction in your storage infrastructure or an malicious action such as a ransomware attack. Having a backup of your critical data provides you with a simple data restoration option. It can enable you to revert to a previous state — before the data loss occurred.

The Benefits Outweigh The Cost

While the initial investment requirements for redundant systems are substantial, there is no doubt that they provide massive benefits and cost-savings in the long run. Ultimately, the organization needs to decide which systems need redundancy, but when implemented effectively, redundancy is a net positive for the organization.