Comparing and Contrasting Availability Management and IT Service Continuity Management

Similarities

•Both processes are concerned with Risk and Risk Management. Both will need to perform risk analysis to determine threats and vulnerability that will affect availability of services and what the It Service provider could do to manage, mitigate or reduce the risks. Both may use CRAMM as a technique to analyse risk.

•Both aims to build resilience in the IT Services and IT Infrastructure. Resilience refers to the  ability to “bounce back” from failure or tolerance to failures. Both works towards ability to recover services quickly to meet agreed service levels, documented in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

•Both are concerned with the ability to meet business needs and goals, including any regulatory requirements.

•Both are conscious of need to balance between cost and effectiveness of proposed solutions.

• Hence, both are focused or concerned with IT services that support vital business services or processes. Both would also need to determine which are the vital business functions or services and what are the impact of their outages. Both are concerned with the cost and impact of service outages.  and would perform Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to analyse business impact should a IT service failed.

Differences

• Differences in scale

IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) looks at large, high profile failures, Availability Management (AM) is concerned with any service outages. ITSCM usually does not cover minor disruptions or faults.

• Differences in impact and timescales

ITSCM concentrates on major or total loss of systems for long durations. This is typically in the event of disaster or crisis scenario.  Availability Management would be interested in partial or single component failures that are likely to have more limited impact and shorter durations.

• Differences in measures and metrics

AM is concerned with Availability, Serviceability, Reliability, Maintainability and security of the IT services based on SLA during normal operational scenarios and within the agreed service time.

ITSCM is concerned with ability and time to recover vital business services on time (Recovery Time Objectives or RTO) and amount of data or services that will be recovered (Recovery Point Objectives or RPO) during disaster or crisis scenarios.

There could be other similarities or differences. Do feel free to leave your comments or add to the list above.