EXAM - Availability Management

Availability Management is responsible for availability of the:

A. Services and Components

B. Services and Business Processes

C. Components and Business Processes

D. Services, Components and Business Processes

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Answer: A

Availability Management is the practice of identifying levels of IT Service availability for use in Service Level Reviews with Customers.
All areas of a service must be measurable and defined within the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
To measure service availability the following areas are usually included in the SLA:

• Agreement statistics – such as what is included within the agreed service.
• Availability – agreed service times, response times, etc.
• Help Desk Calls – number of incidents raised, response times, resolution times.
• Contingency – agreed contingency details, location of documentation, contingency site, 3^rd party involvement, etc.
• Capacity – performance timings for online transactions, report production, numbers of users, etc.
• Costing Details – charges for the service, and any penalties should service levels not be met.

Availability is usually calculated based on a model involving the Availability Ratio and techniques such as Fault Tree Analysis, and includes the following elements:

• Serviceability – where a service is provided by a 3^rd party organisation, this is the expected availability of a component.
• Reliability – the time for which a component can be expected to perform under specific conditions without failure.
• Recoverability – the time it should take to restore a component back to its operational state after a failure.
• Maintainability – the ease with which a component can be maintained, which can be both remedial or preventative.
• Resilience – the ability to withstand failure.
• Security – the ability of components to withstand breaches of security.