Information Management for Dependability

Dependability of a computing system is the ability to deliver service(s) that can confidently be trusted. The term embraces three parts: the attributes of, the means of attaining and threats to dependability. Owing to the severity of failure of such systems, their development is normally carefully controlled by a raft of standards and hurdles standing between the original concept and an operational system. Dependable systems are typically well understood, based around established specification techniques, fault tolerant architectures and implementation language subsets that afford dependability means. Analysis techniques that help identify dependability threats are similarly well understood. This paper considers dependability as an information management (IM) problem and proposes one possible solution.