In this diagram the is a single point of failure for the communication network between computers A single point of failure SPOF is a part of a system that, if it , will. SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of or , be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system. Systems can be made robust by adding in all potential SPOFs. For instance, the owner of a small company may only own one. If the chipper breaks, he may be unable to complete his current job and may have to cancel future jobs until he can obtain a replacement. Redundancy can be achieved at various levels. For instance, the owner of the tree care company may have ready for the repair of the wood chipper, in case it fails. At a higher level, he may have a second wood chipper that he can bring to the job site. Finally, at the highest level, he may have enough equipment available to completely replace everything at the work site in the case of multiple failures. The assessment of a potential SPOF involves identifying the critical components of a complex system that would provoke a total systems failure in case of. Highly should not rely on any such individual component. One would normally deploy a load balancer to ensure high availability for a server cluster at the system level. In a high-availability , each individual server may attain internal component redundancy by having multiple power supplies, hard drives, and other components. System level redundancy could be obtained by having spare servers waiting to take on the work of another server if it fails. Since a data center is often a support center for other operations such as business logic, it represents a potential SPOF in itself. Thus, at the site level, the entire cluster may be replicated at another location, where it can be accessed in case the primary location becomes unavailable. This is typically addressed as part of an IT disaster recovery resiliency program. Such networks — including and the — are designed to have no single point of failure. Multiple paths between any two points on the network allow those points to continue communicating with each other, the packets , even after any single failure of any one particular path or any one intermediate node. The bottleneck has lowest throughput of all parts of the transaction path. Reduction is usually achieved with the help of specialized tools, known as or. The objective being to make those particular sections of code perform as fast as possible to improve overall. Computer security A mistake in just one component can compromise the entire system. The concept of a single point of failure has also been applied to fields outside of engineering, computers, and networking, such as corporate management and transportation management. Design structures that create single points of failure include and in contrast to. In transportation, some noted recent examples of the concept's recent application have included the in Canada, where a partial bridge failure in January 2016 entirely severed road traffic between and for several days because it is located along a portion of the where there is no alternate route for vehicles to take; and the in , , an aging that sometimes gets stuck when opening or closing, disrupting rail traffic on the line. The concept of a single point of failure has also been applied to the fields of intelligence.
