ISO 20000 -Availability Management Process
What is Availability Management Process?
Availability management is the process of ensuring that agreed levels of service availability are achieved and maintained. It includes planning, design, transition, operation, and improvement activities.
The purpose of availability management is to ensure that services can be provided with an acceptable level of service availability, taking into account the cost of achieving this. Availability management concerns service availability, including people, processes, technology, facilities, and the environment.
Achieving and maintaining agreed levels of service availability is a critical element of successful service management. It helps organizations to meet their business objectives and to understand and manage the risks associated with service outages.
A team with specialist skills and knowledge typically manages the availability. The team should include representatives from all key stakeholders, including operations, engineering, finance, marketing, and sales.
The process should be designed to meet the organization's specific needs and be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the business environment. It should be regularly reviewed and updated to reflect organizational changes, its services, and the external environment. The process should be easy to understand, designed to ensure optimal performance and efficiency, and should be monitored and measured for effectiveness. It should reflect the organization’s need for accurate and timely decision-making and provide support for strategic planning and operations. It should be documented and communicated internally and externally to ensure compliance with established guidelines, regulations, and laws. Finally, it should provide adequate training and education to ensure all personnel understands its objectives.
Why is Availability Management Process essential for organizations?
The goal of Availability Management is to ensure that the delivery of timely, quality information and services meets agreed-upon levels of service availability. The process of Availability Management addresses the need to consider all aspects of service availability during the service lifecycle's design, planning, implementation, operation, and continual improvement phases.
As the process owner, the Availability Manager is responsible for ensuring that an Availability Management system is in place and used to manage and protect the availability of all services delivered to the customer.
The Availability Management process consists of the following steps:
- Define service availability targets.
- Monitor service levels.
- Analyze and report on service levels.
- Plan and implement improvements.
- Review and update service availability targets
The Availability Manager must be experienced in all aspects of service delivery, including infrastructure, applications, and networks. They must also understand the customer's goals and objectives to deliver the desired service levels. In addition, the Availability Manager should have good communication skills to build relationships with other teams and meet availability requirements. They will also need to be able to manage any changes to the availability system, ensuring that any changes are communicated to all stakeholders. Finally, the Availability Manager should know the various available for measuring and tracking service availability.
Availability Management Steps
It covers the processes required to plan, design, implement, operate, monitor, and review the performance of an Availability Management system. The system can be used to ensure that all necessary availability requirements are met. The system should also be able to identify and measure any deficiencies in service availability and take appropriate remedial action.
1. Plan and Design Process
The Plan and design process in Availability Management ensures that the required levels of availability are designed for all new and altered IT services and that the processes needed to deliver and support those services are also fit for purpose.
This includes:
- Defining the availability requirements for all new and altered IT services.
- Designing the architecture, components, reliabilities, and dependencies needed to deliver the required levels of availability.
- Identifying the processes and people needed to support the service in line with the defined availability targets.
- Documenting the design decisions made.
2. Risk assessment
Risk assessment is the process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to risks. It includes the identification of risks, the assessment of hazards, and the management of risks.
Risk management is identifying, analyzing, and responding to risks. It includes the identification of risks, the assessment of risks, the management of hazards, and the monitoring of risks.
It includes the identification of the requirements for availability, the assessment of the risks to availability, the management of the risks to availability, and the monitoring of the availability of the system or service.
- Identify Risks
- Assess Risks
- Manage Risk
- Monitor Risk
3. Implement cost-effective measures
To meet this objective, you must implement cost-effective measures that ensure the availability of services in line with the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
The first step in implementing cost-effective measures is establishing the Baseline Availability for each service within the scope of your SMS. The Baseline Availability is the agreed minimum acceptable level of availability for each service. It is important to note that the Baseline Availability will vary from service to service and may differ for different customers or user groups.
These measures may include:
- Reducing the Single Points of Failure (SPOF)
- Improving the availability of components
- Implementing service redundancy
- Improving the resilience of the infrastructure
- Improving problem management.
4. Review the new and changed services
The process is designed to help organizations improve the availability of their services. It is important to note that Availability Management is a process, not a benefit. As such, it cannot be outsourced or sold as a service.
The new and changed services in the Availability Management Process iso 20000 are:
- Service Level Management
- Capacity Management
- Availability Management
Each of these services has been updated to reflect the latest changes in the Availability Management Process.
5. Continual Improvement
The standard requires organizations to improve their availability management processes continuously. Continual improvement helps organizations identify and correct problems, prevent them from happening again, and improve the overall effectiveness of their availability management processes.
6. Monitor and ensure component availability
The process of Monitor and ensuring component availability begins with a baseline being established for each component. This baseline should include all the relevant information about the element, such as performance metrics, capacity, and criticality. Once the baseline has been established, monitoring and ensuring component availability can begin.
7. Investigate service and component outage unavailability
This process identifies the root cause of service and component outages and unavailability and provides recommendations to prevent future incidents.
The investigate service and component outage unavailability process interfaces with the following processes:
- Service level management
- Incident management
- Problem management
- Configuration management
- Change management.
Roles and responsibilities :
1. Availability Manager:
The role of the Availability Manager is to ensure that all systems and services are available as required by the business. This includes ensuring that systems are designed, implemented, and operated to meet availability needs and monitoring and reporting on availability.
The Availability Manager is responsible for the following:
- Gathering and maintaining availability requirements
- Defining availability targets
- Defining availability SLAs
- Monitoring and reporting on availability
- Coordinating incident response
- Coordinating change management
- Coordinating capacity management
- Coordinating disaster recovery and business continuity plans
- Identifying and mitigating IT availability risks
- Acting as an advisor to other teams.
2. Service Owner
The Service Owner ensures that the service meets the agreed-upon availability targets.
3. Process Manager
The Process Manager is responsible for ensuring that the agreed-upon plans and procedures carry out the process.
4. Configuration Manager
The Configuration Manager is responsible for maintaining an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all the software and hardware components that make up the service.
5. Incident Manager
The Incident Manager ensures that all incidents are dealt with promptly and efficiently.
6. Problem Manager
The Problem Manager is responsible for investigating the root cause of incidents and taking corrective action to prevent them from happening again.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Availability Management is a process that involves planning, monitoring, and reporting to ensure that systems and services meet business objectives for availability. The goal is to ensure that all systems and services are available when needed and that the proper redundancies are in place to maintain availability. Through this process, the desired levels of availability can be tracked, analyzed, and reported over time.
