Human error in network operations and how to deal with it
You might have been alarmed to read recently that half of all network problems are due to human error. Well, bad news. That’s true of the number of problems. If you look at the hours of degraded or failed operation, three-quarters of all of it is due to human error. Furthermore, the great majority of degraded or failed operation can be traced to four specific activities:
- Fault analysis and response, which network professionals and their management say creates 36% of error-induced outage time
- Configuration changes (attributed to 27% of error-induced outage time)
- Scaling and failover tasks (attributed to 19% of error-induced outage time)
- Security policies (attributed to 18% of error-induced outage time)
Not surprisingly, network professionals are eager to find remedies for each of the four primary culprits. Before that can happen, it’s important to understand why the human error occurs.