Single Window Systems
In the OIC Member States
101
5.1.5. IT Infrastructure
Three challenges occur or relate to the IT infrastructure. The table below shows these challenges
and possible strategies and options to overcome these challenges.
Table 26: IT Infrastructure - Challenges and Options
Challenges
1. Lack of Backup and Business Continuity
There is insufficient awareness of the crucial importance of backup and business continuity. Only
few S’s have adopted the high availability concept that includes business continuity and disaster
recovery plans, procedures and backup site. Lack of funds is a major obstacle for the
implementation of backup site.
Why does it matter?
Lack of backup and business continuity highly exposes SW to risks of ensuring availability and
system continuity and disaster recovery73. There may be a low probability of an incident, but
impact/damages are high, in particular because it is a public service – unavailability of port or
customs clearance process can cause serious delays and the direct and indirect cost of downtime
are high.
2. Lack of Cost-effectiveness
Underutilization or lack of use of the hardware components’ performance and resources leads to
incorrect and less cost effective infrastructure design. The usage of dedicated clustering
technology dramatically increases the cost for expansion of the infrastructure and the required
level of services.
3. Performance Limitations
It is difficult to increase performance of the system if the operational data is not divided. To store
and manage the SW data is difficult task from the physical (repository) side, but also from the
logical point of view, taking into account the complexity and amount of data. Many SW keep the
operational data and archive (write off, expired permit and certificates data) on the same physical
and logical repository. The management and enquiry of such a large amount of data decrease the
overall performances of the SW infrastructure.
Policy Options
1. Use of High Availability Concept
The High Availability concept can maximize the accessibility of the SW IT infrastructure and its
supporting services. The advantages are
73 ISO , ISO/IEC 27031:2011 Information technology — Security techniques — Guidelines for information and
communications technology readiness for business continuity unde
(accessed January 2017).