Disclaimer: The views expressed in the blog are personal. It is not meant to hurt any sentiments. Any connections direct or indirect to anyone, any place or anything is purely coincidental. It is only meant to be fun to read and possibly portray me as a great thinker ;)
Most of us have been regaled by the works of JRR Tolkien - 'Lord of The Rings', 'The Hobbit', be it movies or books. I am a big fan and claim to have gobbled through the whole LOTR book and cannot get tired of watching the movies over and over again.
The last edition of 'The Hobbit' movie drove me into some research on characters. One character that never seems to give up and keeps coming back again and again since the beginning of Tolkien's mythical world is Sauron/Necromancer there are other names for him that can be found in other books of his. Kudos to his tenacity! If this has piqued your interest in him and you don't want to trawl through books you can read a short biography on this link (Thank you IMDB).
What if Sauron had learnt lesson from his previous failures and hired a consultant to have a look at his plan of conquering the world? What would the process flow look like? I put myself in the poor auditor's shoes, kept my hate aside for all his wrong doings and objectively looked at his strategy. Here it is in brief:
Sauron had accumulated the resources and invested the required time into putting his plan in action and the plan went on for the first two eras (approx 2000 yrs). We could get into analysis of each individual step and discuss the pros and cons of each but since the focus of this topic is to identify the failures let us stick to that.
A close look at the stories that took place in various eras reveals one thing in common i.e. Sauron launches a mass attack on other kingdoms. All of them revolt individually or for an alliance against him. Then a war ensues and ultimately Sauron loses. An even closer look at the end of these battle would show that Sauron is about to win the battle when he some how manages to lose the ring leading to his loss of power and hence the war. Following is a brief flow of events across ages:
What does this have to do anything with practical world anyway? We can say that the ring in this case is a 'Single Point of Failure' or 'Bottleneck' in business terms or 'Achilles' heel' in literary terms. A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. (Wikipedia).
Any industry best practice warns an organization against such SPOFs. There are three basic principles in security: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. SPOF has a direct impact on system or process availability and the effect is easier to comprehend. Example, Say all the organization data is stored in a single server. Then the server is an SPOF. In case of server failure, data becomes unavailable for everyone. Another example from a different industry, say a hospital is situated in a place with only one approach route. In case a natural calamity like snow storm or landslide blocks the route the services of the hospital would be cut off when it is needed the most. Even confidentiality and integrity are affected by such failure points. Any audit has a clear directive to identify and report such single points of failure in the organization.
What to do? There is no single shot to cure it all. Careful monitoring of systems and processes is required. A common practice to circumvent the issue is to maintain redundancy. If a bottleneck is unavoidable the onus is on the organization to have special continuity and recovery strategies in place. Special care should be given to prevent such points in the process flow from failing. In manufacturing critical machine components are always on standby and continuous and proactive/preventive maintenance is carried out. Imagine if Sauron had backup rings and could whip it out when in dire straits and remotely deactivate the lost ring instead of frantically searching for it! Well then the story won't be so much fun and I like happy endings in my story.
I would go even further and say that Lord Voldemort (Harry Potter Series) was more sensible, if compared to Sauron, as he had created backup Horcruxes stowed away here and there as backups. Although I am happy that both villains suffer the same fate in the end but the same is not true when it comes to business processes.
Ciao!
Most of us have been regaled by the works of JRR Tolkien - 'Lord of The Rings', 'The Hobbit', be it movies or books. I am a big fan and claim to have gobbled through the whole LOTR book and cannot get tired of watching the movies over and over again.
The last edition of 'The Hobbit' movie drove me into some research on characters. One character that never seems to give up and keeps coming back again and again since the beginning of Tolkien's mythical world is Sauron/Necromancer there are other names for him that can be found in other books of his. Kudos to his tenacity! If this has piqued your interest in him and you don't want to trawl through books you can read a short biography on this link (Thank you IMDB).
What if Sauron had learnt lesson from his previous failures and hired a consultant to have a look at his plan of conquering the world? What would the process flow look like? I put myself in the poor auditor's shoes, kept my hate aside for all his wrong doings and objectively looked at his strategy. Here it is in brief:
 |
Process map of Sauron's conquest of the World. |
A close look at the stories that took place in various eras reveals one thing in common i.e. Sauron launches a mass attack on other kingdoms. All of them revolt individually or for an alliance against him. Then a war ensues and ultimately Sauron loses. An even closer look at the end of these battle would show that Sauron is about to win the battle when he some how manages to lose the ring leading to his loss of power and hence the war. Following is a brief flow of events across ages:
 |
Event flow leading to Sauron's defeat |
What does this have to do anything with practical world anyway? We can say that the ring in this case is a 'Single Point of Failure' or 'Bottleneck' in business terms or 'Achilles' heel' in literary terms. A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. (Wikipedia).
Any industry best practice warns an organization against such SPOFs. There are three basic principles in security: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. SPOF has a direct impact on system or process availability and the effect is easier to comprehend. Example, Say all the organization data is stored in a single server. Then the server is an SPOF. In case of server failure, data becomes unavailable for everyone. Another example from a different industry, say a hospital is situated in a place with only one approach route. In case a natural calamity like snow storm or landslide blocks the route the services of the hospital would be cut off when it is needed the most. Even confidentiality and integrity are affected by such failure points. Any audit has a clear directive to identify and report such single points of failure in the organization.
What to do? There is no single shot to cure it all. Careful monitoring of systems and processes is required. A common practice to circumvent the issue is to maintain redundancy. If a bottleneck is unavoidable the onus is on the organization to have special continuity and recovery strategies in place. Special care should be given to prevent such points in the process flow from failing. In manufacturing critical machine components are always on standby and continuous and proactive/preventive maintenance is carried out. Imagine if Sauron had backup rings and could whip it out when in dire straits and remotely deactivate the lost ring instead of frantically searching for it! Well then the story won't be so much fun and I like happy endings in my story.
I would go even further and say that Lord Voldemort (Harry Potter Series) was more sensible, if compared to Sauron, as he had created backup Horcruxes stowed away here and there as backups. Although I am happy that both villains suffer the same fate in the end but the same is not true when it comes to business processes.
Ciao!
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