Task: Plan For Technology Availability

Planning for technology availability is imperative as it enables the engagement to provide and improve services, inline with the availability committed targets (as defined in the Service Level Agreement). Planning is also essential to forecast the future technology availability levels and requirements, in order to ensure continuity in services. The Technology Availability Plan will define the technology availability targets, measurement points, measuring logic, data sources used for availability calculation, list of business accepted risk and changes that will influence technology availability.

Designing for technology availability is implicit to technology availability planning. The Availability Manager may need to modify the existing IT product architecture and design, to incorporate changes in services (if any) or improvements in technology availability. The design must be accomodative of changes while ensuring the performance of existing services is not negatively impacted. The design must be resilient to failures. Single points of failures must be identified and available alternatives should be considered, to ensure minimizing disruption to business operations. Additionally, while designing techniques like simulation, modelling or load testing must be used to generate the expected user demand for the new IT service. These must be considered to ensure components continue to operate under anticipated volume and stress conditions.

Any new or changed availability requirements must be captured in the Technology Availability Plan. Vital business functions and critical configuration items must be identified and the relationships between the existing services need to be identified as part of availability planning. Whenever a new technology component is added into the infrastructure, or an existing component is modified, availability measures and measurement points (for the component) must be defined.The measurement points provide a baseline and threshold to calculate the availability measurements. The Availability Manager must assess technical feasibility, financial and legal impact, business impact etc. for the change.

All proposed actions to meet or exceed availability requirements must be documented in the Technology Availability Plan. The plan must be approved by all relevant stakeholders (internal and external). The Technology Availability Plan must be updated regularly to reflect all the changes that may impact the availability of services.