1. Who is responsible in cases of failure?
• This is not any question to answer.  The root cause of a problem is not always something that can be prevented easily without restricting users' access to machines.  In corporate intranets, users could be the problem by installing non-cooperative software on their machines or non-cooperative OSes or beta software.
• A badly designed network would be the fault of the network administrators as was the case with Microsoft's network.
• The business could be held responsible if it doesn't feel that enough money should be budgeted to the IT department to update the systems so that they can serve what is demanded by the customer.
  
2. How does an administrator or business plan ahead?
• First, the administrators must cover all the typiucal bases.  They should have redundancy systems setup but in different locations so that an attck or failure at one site won't have a direct effect on the others.
• After all obvious problems are covered, then they should create plans in case of catastrophes.  Your access provider's system going down is not something that is always accounted for and when they go down, the business is stranded unless they have made agreements with other providers to support them in case their primary provider is down.  The death of the network administrator or complete loss of contact to the outside world at a site are also rarely accounted for.
  
3. What are ...
• Outage - a case in which there is no movement of network traffic.
• Congestion - a case in which network traffic is severely limited but moving.
• Redundancy - having multiple copies of your systems and data so that if one goes down, the other(s) can take over that one's load.
• Distributed Redundancy - having your redundancy systems spread across multiple locations so that an failure at one site has no direct effect on the others.

 

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