Information Assurance

13.1. Introduction

The occurrence of outages due to failures in today’s information technology infrastructure is a real problem that still begs a satisfactory solution. The backbone of the ubiquitous information technology infrastructure is formed by distributed systems—distributed middleware, such as CORBA and DCOM; distributed file systems, such as NFS and XFS; distributed coordination-based systems, such as publish-subscribe systems and network protocols; and above all, the distributed infrastructure of the World Wide Web. Distributed systems support many critical applications in the civilian and military domains. Critical civilian applications abound in private enterprise, such as banking, electronic commerce, and industrial control systems, ...