Availability vs. Infrastructure Cost

Replace static dedicated redundancy with shared, dynamically reassigned protection pools tiered by service criticality to achieve availability without proportional cost growth.

CyberTRIZ analysis · Telecommunications contradiction RO001 · one of 8,235 worked contradictions published by CyberTRIZ.AI

Regulations

EU_NIS2 ISO_22313 ISO_22317 IEC_62443

Business Context

High telecommunications availability traditionally depends on duplicated links, equipment, power systems, sites, transport paths, computing resources, and supporting infrastructure. These investments reduce the probability that a single failure will interrupt service, but they can significantly increase both capital and operating costs. The problem becomes more severe when dedicated protection resources remain unused during normal operation.

Telecommunications TRIZ Resolution

Availability should be created through shared and dynamically reassigned resilience resources rather than universal physical duplication. Active-active architectures, traffic rerouting, resource pooling, geographically distributed workloads, elastic computing, and shared protection capacity can allow infrastructure to perform useful work during normal conditions while remaining capable of supporting recovery. Protection should also be differentiated according to service criticality instead of applying identical redundancy to every function.

Applicable TRIZ Principles

Principle 5 – Merging allows common protection resources to support multiple services or failure conditions.

Principle 6 – Universality enables infrastructure to perform both productive and recovery functions.

Principle 15 – Dynamics reallocates capacity and workloads when failures change operating conditions.

Expected Outcome

Higher service availability

Reduced dedicated standby infrastructure

Better asset utilization

Lower cost of resilience

Decision Indicators

Early indicators include:

Availability improvements require nearly proportional infrastructure duplication.

Large amounts of backup capacity remain permanently idle.

All services receive similar protection regardless of criticality.

Resilience investment grows faster than active network capacity.

Availability targets increasingly conflict with capital-efficiency objectives.

TRIZ principles applied

P5 MergingP6 UniversalityP15 Dynamics

Controls that address this (22)

EU_NIS2-CTRL-001 - Daily safeguarding reconciliationoperational · critical priority · Daily reconciliation between safeguarded customer balances, core ledger balances and safeguarded bank accounts. Variances above EUR 100 must EU_NIS2-CTRL-002 - Critical ICT incident reportingoperational · critical priority · All major ICT incidents impacting payment services, customer data or availability must be classified within 4 hours and reported under DORA EU_NIS2-CTRL-003 - GDPR breach notification workflowoperational · critical priority · Personal data breaches must be assessed within 12 hours and reported to the Belgian DPA within 72 hours where risk to data subjects exists.