Personnel assets are the people working for the company. The success of any organization is due in large part to its personnel. Sometimes, things work best when several key personnel have been trained for any key function, instead of a single person.

When any function or process depends on a single person, that person becomes an SPOF. Although having talented and skilled personnel is desirable, having too much reliance on a single person is not.

Many things can take an employee out of the environment, including illness, accident, family emergency, winning the lottery, a better job, or more money elsewhere. Job conditions and pay can be controlled, but most other things can’t.

A hard drive can be an SPOF, and it can be protected with a RAID. As well, a server can be an SPOF, and a failover cluster can be used to protect against its failure.

Similarly, a person can be an SPOF, as previously mentioned. If only one person knows how to maintain a system, that system is at risk. This risk can be reduced by taking certain measures, such as:

• Hiring additional personnel—If a critical system is maintained by only one person, hiring additional personnel to help can eliminate the SPOF.
• Cross-training—Personnel should be cross-trained in different systems. They will still perform a primary job function, but they will occasionally spend time learning about other job functions. Cross-training helps broaden personnel’s understanding of overall operations. They will then be able to step in for short-term emergencies when necessary.
• Rotating jobs—Personnel can be rotated into different jobs on a regular basis, such as once a year. Rotating people into different jobs helps them build skills in various technologies and helps ensure that more than one person knows how to maintain any IT system. Job rotation also helps an organization discover dangerous shortcuts or fraudulent activities. Rotating personnel into and out of jobs helps an IT administrator gain more internal oversight into job practices, which ensures that personnel are following rules and policies and reduces the possibility of collusion. Collusion occurs when two or more people engage in secret activity for fraudulent purposes.