Availability Management
Practical Case
Availability 12/7 is a feature on which the customers of "Cater Matters" place great importance.
IT services play a small, although important, part in the services the organisation provides to its customers and availability problems usually arise from processes that are not directly technology related. However, an interruption to online services can represent a serious problem given the large volume of orders received via this channel (almost all orders), and its importance for managing stocks of raw materials.
Availability Management, in collaboration with the people responsible for the other IT processes has been charged with drawing up new availability plans that take the rapid growth of the business into account, which may entail 24/7 availability being needed for certain business lines.
Drawing up this new plan requires:
- Revision of the UCs in effect with Internet service providers.
- Definition of levels of availability for the new services.
- Design for 24/7 availability of the IT services offered.
- New management plans for maintenance requiring real interruptions to service.
Moreover, the management of "Cater Matters" has decided to regularly inform customers about the levels of performance and availability of the various different services provided. To do so they have charged Availability Management with implementing the procedures necessary to measure:
- The time between incidents.
- The time the service is down.
- The time taken to respond to each incident.
- The delay in service delivery.
This will be complemented by a module automatically performing statistical calculations and generating reports on compliance with the levels of availability agreed with each customer.
In this way, "Cater Matters" hopes to build a relationship of trust with its customers and keep the IT organisation alert to any possible degradation of the level of quality of service.
