Availability Management

Introduction and Objectives

The fundamental objective of Availability Management is to ensure that all the IT services are available and are functioning correctly whenever customers and users want to make use of them in the framework of the SLAs in force.

The responsibilities of Availability Management include:

• Determining availability requirements in close collaboration with customers.
• Guaranteeing the level of availability established for the IT services.
• Monitoring the availability of the IT services.
• Proposing improvements in the IT infrastructure and services with a view to increasing levels of availability.
• Supervising compliance with the OLAs and UCs agreed with internal and external service providers.

The key indicators on which the Availability Management process rests are:

• Availability: the time that the service functioned correctly expressed as a percentage the total time it has been agreed that the IT services are to be accessible to users.
• Reliability: measure of the time the services functioned correctly without interruptions.
• Maintainability: capacity to maintain the service operational and recover it in the event of an interruption.
• Service Capacity: determines the availability of the internal and external services contracted and their appropriateness for the OLAs and UCs in force. When an IT service as a whole is subcontracted, the terms availability and service capacity are equivalent.

The availability depends on the correct design of the IT services, the reliability of the CIs involved, their proper maintenance and the quality of the internal and external services agreed.

The main benefits of correct Availability Management are:

• Fulfilment of the agreed service levels.
• Reduction in the costs associated with a given level of availability.
• The customer perceives a better quality of service.
• The levels of availability progressively increase.
• The number of incidents is reduced.

The main difficulties in Availability Management are:

• The real availability of the service is not monitored correctly.
• There is no commitment to the process in the IT organisation.
• The appropriate software tools and personnel are not available.
• The availability objectives do not match the customer's needs.
• There is a lack of coordination with other processes.
• Internal and external service providers do not recognise the authority of the Availability Manager as a result of a lack of support from management.