Availability and Svc Continuity Mgmt

[shamanIT]

can someone help shed some light if there are any differences and commonalities between Availability and Service Continuity Mgmt? been reading and reading to try clear my head but am still pretty confused.

thanks in advance!

[UKVIKING]

availability mgmt is the managing of the existing service that is provided to the consumer of the service

continuity mgmt is the discipline to ensure that the service is provide even in case of major outages
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Diarmid]

Think of continuity management as your contingency plans and processes, the development, maintenance and testing of them. It is ongoing activity since every change made in your service (via Change Management - i.e. every change) may impinge on your contingency needs.

It should really be part of overall business continuity, but if your organization is not very cued up on that, that is no excuse for not designing the best you can for the IT services and it will involve customers and users.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[jpgilles]

Hi,

In my understanding Availbility Management and Continuity Management are totally different.

- AM is about ensuring the agreed availability under NORMAL conditions of operations: your datacenter is up, your people are available, your service infrastructure is available too, and you "only" have to deal with a few incidents (even is some are major ones)
- CM is about ensuring your company will survive a major disaster: the company is still able to perform business critical activities even though you are under absolutely disastrous conditions: your datacenter is down or nearly so, most of your people are not available, ....

Basic definitions I used to use in training sessions.

regards
JP
_________________
JP Gilles

[thechosenone69]

Jp,

The goal of availability is to optimize the capability of the IT Infrastructure, services and supporting organization to deliver a cost effective and sustained level of Availability that enables the business to satisfy its objectives.

As for ITSCM the Goal is to support the overall Business Continuity Management process by ensuring that all required IT services can be recovered within required and agreed business timescales.

Yes they do have things so as differences, things incommon can be things like: Risk reduction measures, both are needed for legal obligation at certain businesses, Improving organizational credibility etc..

As for differences: Availability tries to optimize the infrastructure and identify shortfalls to improve availability of services to users. Where as ITSCM deals with recovery for things that cant be controlled as you have mentioned earlier"Disasters" ITSCM job here is to recover services to the business not necessarily all services though it can be partial, Just the vital business processes to enable the business to continue to operate with minimal services. I can go on talking about this for hours. Read chapters 7 & 8 in the red book, its crystal clear..
_________________
Ali Makahleh
Configuration Management(Blue Badge),
ITILV2 Service Manager(Red Badge),
ITILV3 Expert(Lilac Badge) Certified.

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." W. Edwards Deming.