Internet Redundancy

["Shields, Ken" <kenshields@xxxxxxx>]

Hello gang

        Most of the older, traditional telecommunication backbones, either on 
the part of the telephone companies themselves,
        or, if your company had sufficient budget, always provided a backup 
methodology to their infrastructure.

        Over the last many years, I've been witnessing a quantum leap by 
companies to port their telecommunication 
        systems to the Internet.
        The assumption on the part of the corporations utilizing the Internet, 
is that it is an extremely stable and well 
        supported chain of servers, from AT&T to UCC Net, and intrinsically, 
can experience a 'problem' or outage of 
        a large segment of the system, but the Internet as a whole will keep 
running.
        
        The older systems were concerned solely with physical 
inter-connectivity of networks, but as we all know
        the Internet is subject to a new problem, namely viruses, and hackers.

        This new 'Achilles heel', I suspect, will one day cause a great deal of 
trouble to our wired society, and the problem
        will probably come from a very intelligent , very computer literate 
individual, and not some wise kid, trying to 
        impress his girl friend.
        
        Does anyone know if this redundancy shortfall is wide spread, or are 
there in fact, some form of backup to the 
        Internet paradigm?

Ken Shields  
PPG Canada Inc
kenshields@xxxxxxx