IT Service Continuity Management

IT Service Continuity management covers the processes by which plans are put in place and managed to ensure that IT Services can recover and continue should a serious incident occur. It is not just about reactive measures, but also about proactive measures - reducing the risk of a disaster in the first instance.
Continuity management is regarded by the application owners as the recovery of the IT infrastructure used to deliver IT Services, but as of 2009[update] many businesses practice the much further-reaching process of Business Continuity Planning (BCP), to ensure that the whole end-to-end business process can continue should a serious incident occur (at primary support level).
Continuity management involves the following basic steps:
• Prioritising the activities to be recovered by conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
• Performing a Risk Assessment (aka risk analysis) for each of the IT Services to identify the assets, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures for each service.
• Evaluating the options for recovery
• Producing the Contingency Plan
• Testing, reviewing, and revising the plan on a regular basis
Availability Management
Availability Management targets allowing organisations to sustain the IT service-availability to support the business at a justifiable cost. The high-level activities are Realise Availability Requirements, Compile Availability Plan, Monitor Availability, and Monitor Maintenance Obligations.
Availability Management addresses the ability of an IT component to perform at an agreed level over a period of time.
• Reliability: Ability of an IT component to perform at an agreed level at described conditions.
• Maintainability: The ability of an IT component to remain in, or be restored to an operational state.
• Serviceability: The ability for an external supplier to maintain the availability of component or function under a third-party contract.
• Resilience: A measure of freedom from operational failure and a method of keeping services reliable. One popular method of resilience is redundancy.
• Security: A service may have associated data. Security refers to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of that data. Availability gives a clear overview of the end-to-end availability of the system.