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ITIL Availability Management

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ITIL Availability Management ensures the availability of the IT Services in a way that all components of the IT Services ie:

support the achievement of agreed availability goals. Availability Management is part of Service Design[1] The official definition of Availability in ITIL is the ability of a configuration item or IT service to perform its agreed function when required.


The Goal of the Availability Management Process[2]
The main goal of the Availability Management process is ensuring that the level of service availability meets or exceeds the current and the future agreed needs of the business in a cost efficient way for all delivered services. Generally, availability is measured in terms of percentage over the expected operation time.

For instance, if the operation time of a service is from eight am in the morning to six pm in the evening, it is active for ten hours of operation time and 600 minutes respectively. And if the business expects 99% availability for this service, by multiplying 600 minutes with the 99% availability service level target, we find the minimum operation time without interruption is 594. This means, only six minutes of outage or interruption can be accepted for this service by the business during the hours of operation in a day. And the main goal of the availability management is ensuring these kinds of availability service level targets for the delivered services to the customers in a cost-effective manner.


Availability Management – Basic Concepts[3]

  • Availability: In simplest terms, the ability of a service, component or CI to perform its agreed function when required. This term answer the question, is it available to use when needed?
  • Reliability: A measure of how long a service, component or CI can perform its agreed function without interruption. When we understood the availability, thequestions comes, how long the service will be available? This can be answered by reliability.
  • Maintainability: A measure of how quickly and effectively a service, component or CI can be restored to normal after a failure. The emphasis is on how soon or how quickly the services can be back to BAU.
  • Serviceability: The ability of a third party supplier to meet the terms of their contract. Often this contract will include agreed levels of availability, reliability and / or maintainability for a supporting service or component. Serviceability and Maintainability are often confusing terms however the key differentiating term here is involvement of third party suppliers to restore the service or component.


Principles of Availability Management[4]
There are two interconnected levels which complete availability management.

  • Component availability: It involved all the aspects of component availability.
  • Service availability: It involves all the aspects of service availability and the actual or potential service impact that component availability can create.


Availability Management Principles


See Also

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
ITIL Event Management
ITIL Facilities Management
ITIL Problem Management
ITIL Service Delivery
ITIL Service Design
ITIL Service Lifecycle
ITIL Service Operation
ITIL Service Strategy
ITIL Service Transition
ITIL Service Value Chain (SVC)
ITIL Service Value System (SVS)
Service Portfolio Management
Service Portfolio
Service Catalog
Service Catalog Management
IT Governance
IT Infrastructure
IT Operations (Information Technology Operations)
Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT)
Balanced Scorecard
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)
Risk Management
IT Strategy (Information Technology Strategy)
Business Strategy
Corporate Governance
Corporate Strategy
Enterprise Architecture
COSO Internal Control- Integrated Framework
Compliance


References

  1. Definition - What is ITIL Availability Management? ITSM Processes
  2. The Goal of the Availability Management Process Master of Project
  3. The Basic Concepts of Availability Management foundation/availability-management-goals-and-objectives Grey Campus
  4. Principles of Availability Management Invensis