Availability Management

On continuing to discuss infrastructure management processes - the objectives of Availability management process can be summarized as the following:

• To produce and maintain an appropriate and up-to-date Availability Plan that accurately reflects current and future needs of the organization.
• To offer advice and guidance to all other areas of the organization and IT on availability-related issues.
• To ensure that availability achievements meet or exceed targets.
• To assist with the diagnosis and resolution of availability-related incidents and problems.
• To evaluate the influence of any changes on the Availability Plan and on the performance and capacity of all services and resources. 
• To ensure that all cost-effective measures to improve the availability of services are implemented. 

I like the fact that Availability Managements processes incorporate reactive and proactive activities.  We can't get away from reactive activities as service level activities are dynamic in nature hence involve monitoring, measuring, fulfilling, analyzing and fixing problem on unavailability. Proactive activities refer to more into planning, designing, re-designing  and process improvement steps. So we see reactive activities are operational in nature whereas proactive activities of Availability management process fall under more planning functions.

Thoughts on Availability Management.

Sam Kurien