Original post in Brazillian portuguese by Emerson Dorow. He authorized me to post in english language.
http://www.profissionaisti.com.br/2009/11/itil-gerenciamento-da-disponibilidade/
Availability Management aims to provide cost effective a certain level of availability of IT services, enabling the business to achieve their goals. It is responsible for ensuring that IT services can be offered according to the level of availability required by users or customers, worrying about the design, implementation, metrics, and the availability management of IT infrastructure, according with the needs of the organization. We should also implement the availability management to all new services offered in accordance with the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defined.
It is common to want our IT infrastructure 100% available. But what does it cost? Is it feasible? Benefits justify the costs? Agreeing that a company e-commerce or a hospital must have 99.99999% availability 24 hours X 7 days a week, but other areas of performance actually need it? The availability management will help us answer this type of question. The availability will help us assess these issues in order to have information to show the direction of the company for the cost of having a certain amount of availability during a certain amount of time.
It is the responsibility of Availability Management also the management of outsourced services, to ensure the availability of services desired by Service Level Agreements and operational level agreements. The operational level agreements exist to support SLA contracts. For example: There is a service database that runs on the hardware A. This service must be restored by IT completely within 6 hours to the business (SLA). IT may have a contract with a third party hardware, or even the database, which in a parade service needs to be restored in 4 hours (operational level agreements), thus supporting the business needs is to have the service in the air 6 hours. Some of the responsibilities of this process:
- Recommendation related to the IT infrastructure to ensure the resilience of the IT infrastructure.
- Reports on the availability of services.
- Procedures to ensure the availability and recovery of each IT service new or improved.
- Plans to improve the availability of IT Services
Concerning availability, there is a formula where we can calculate the same:
D = (TS – TD) / TD x 100, where D = Availability, TS = Time of Service agreed and DT = Downtime.
One result of this process may be the level of availability. Where all the information about IT services are compiled and presented to the Business Managers to analyze and decide together with IT that the required availability for the service and at what cost to insure this. If it is not possible to create resilience within the organization because of the cost, you can create a “plan B” or more commonly called the recovery plan.
Situations that may affect the process of Availability Management are the availability requirements of business that are not clear to IT, also the lack of involvement of business managers with the process.
Thanks!
