Business operations depend on the availability of key systems and resources, and the extent to which they are available is a key factor in how well a company performs. That makes system availability — i.e., avoiding downtime — a central concern for chief information officers (CIOs). This article offers seven suggestions for improving system availability, so that CIOs can support their organisations with services that are always on.
Key Takeaways
- As business operations become increasingly digital, organisations become more dependent on applications and services that are continuously available. This is why the issue of system availability is so critical from the CIO’s perspective.
- To maximise system availability, the CIO should begin by calculating the cost of downtime to the company and prioritising the applications and services on which it most depends.
- Once the costs and priorities are understood, the CIO can devise availability protocols and invest in infrastructure solutions that support the company’s business objectives.
How Has the CIO Role Evolved?
In recent years, the CIO has become the champion of the digital enterprise amid widespread expectations that greater automation and advanced technologies — such as artificial intelligence and online self-service capabilities for customers and business partners — will lead to greater profitability and growth. To a large extent, the success or failure of these initiatives is seen as the CIO’s responsibility, and the CIO has become the de facto leader for digital transformation at many organisations.
The CIO’s Role in System Availability
But as digital services and applications become ever more central to how a business operates, companies become ever more dependent on the systems that support those services. This is why the issue of system availability is so critical from the CIO’s perspective. Poor or inconsistent system availability translates into downtime that impedes business operations, distresses customers and partners, and makes employees less productive. And all of this can directly impact the company’s financial performance. For all these reasons, CIOs shoulder a crucial responsibility to ensure that mission-critical applications and services are always available.
7 Tips to Improve System Availability
In addition to developing broader habits of successful business leaders, CIOs need actionable advice for improving system availability. Adopting the following seven best practices will help CIOs reduce mean time between system failures and create an environment that can support ‘always-on’ operations.- Calculate the cost of downtime of mission-critical services.
Without knowing how much system downtime is costing the company, a CIO will have a hard time securing the investment needed to sustain an always-on environment. But calculating the true cost of an outage — including its impact on brand reputation and customer retention — can be a daunting task. Limiting an analysis to revenue and productivity losses is much simpler and still provides a solid basis for determining the return on investment (ROI) of any preventive measures.
Keep in mind that the timing and duration of an outage will impact the extent of any losses incurred. An extended period of downtime during peak business hours will obviously result in greater losses than a brief service interruption during off hours. When calculating downtime costs, the CIO should take these variables into account.
Since even this more limited exercise can still be challenging, it may be easier to determine the cost of downtime service by service or application by application, starting with the most critical, instead of trying to gauge the costs for the entire corporate infrastructure. This will give the CIO a good initial window into how much downtime is costing the organisation and the level of investment in downtime prevention required to mitigate these costs.
- Monitor end-to-end service and application availability.
Many IT departments rigorously track server and storage uptime, but fewer monitor end-to-end uptime across all the infrastructure and software components required to deliver a given application or service (such as email). This, however, is the single most important thing a CIO can track, as it’s the metric that most closely reflects the actual user experience. When an important application or service goes down, operations grind to a halt; employees can’t do their work and customers are unhappy.
- Match business objectives to the right mix of technologies.
There are many technologies that can support the always-on enterprise, including application and service monitoring solutions, active-active architectures, rapid virtual machine rebooting and a wide variety of software-as-a-service (SaaS) options delivered via the cloud. For the CIO, the tricky part is matching the right solutions to the company’s business objectives. Among other things, this means devising a strategy that supports the requisite level of system availability while remaining within budget.
To this end, service-level agreements (SLAs) are a useful tool for forging agreements between different business units and the IT department. With an SLA, the business unit prioritises its availability requirements and specifies the level of uptime it needs. This, in turn, allows the CIO to map each business unit’s requirements to the appropriate set of technologies that will support them.
- Plan for system components to fail but strive for 100% service uptime.
Murphy’s Law warns that ‘Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong — and at the worst possible time’. This certainly applies to digital businesses, which are dependent on increasingly complex systems and applications. The implication is that 100% uptime of all system components is not a realistic goal; there are far too many potential points of failure. For the CIO, a more viable objective is to maintain 100% service continuity for the company’s mission-critical applications. With proactive planning, good maintenance and service monitoring processes, and with the right rapid response measures in place, this can be achieved.
- Include availability and continuity considerations in application development
and testing.
Too often, the ability to support an application’s availability and continuity are considered only after it has been deployed. By then, the application’s processing and logic, as well as the server and other infrastructure on which the application runs, may limit the service levels that the application can support. To avoid these constraints, the CIO should make application resiliency an integral part of the organisation’s development, infrastructure selection and acceptance testing process.
- Create a standard protocol for responding to availability issues.
To ensure optimal system availability, the CIO should ensure that the organisation puts in place standard processes and procedures for support personnel to follow when diagnosing and correcting potential points of failure. For example, if a system component becomes unresponsive, such a protocol might include a series of steps to diagnose the problem and a range of potential responses, basing escalation speed on the level of risk to the business should the application fail completely.
Known as a maintenance SOP (standard operating procedure), this is a detailed document that describes the steps to be taken when addressing a problem, the expected practices and the quality standards that need to be met. Defining these procedures is also useful for training technicians and IT operations managers. It can also help ensure regulatory compliance, as the steps included should adhere to industry regulations and applicable laws, as well as corporate standards.
Having a maintenance SOP in place for addressing common types of system failure improves response times and ensures that system engineers will receive the diagnostic data they need to resolve the root cause of failure in the wake of an incident.
- Automate to reduce human error.
Some degree of human error is inevitable, which means that the more people are involved in a process, the more likely it is that mistakes will occur. Business automation statistics have demonstrated automation’s value time after time. Automating routine tasks reduces errors and improves system availability. In addition, by relieving the IT staff from having to perform many system monitoring and maintenance procedures, the CIO can free up valuable resources for application development and other value-add activities. Since most IT professionals will welcome such a change, automated monitoring and maintenance can also help the CIO’s talent retention and recruitment efforts.
By engaging in these seven best practices, a CIO can ensure that the organisation’s most business-critical applications and services are always available on an as-needed basis. This is a prerequisite for a true digital business that must service its customers and support its business partners 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
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System Availability FAQs
What is meant by system availability?
The term ‘system availability’ refers to a commonly used metric that indicates the likelihood that a computer system or another complex piece of equipment will be available for use when needed. The metric is presented as a percentage of uptime, as opposed to downtime.
What is availability maintenance?
The system availability metric is used to measure the effectiveness of system maintenance, as this has a big impact on whether or not a system will be available for use when it’s needed. Downtime can be broken down into planned vs. unplanned and frequency vs. length, and maintenance measures can be adjusted accordingly. For example, if the lion’s share of downtime is unplanned, then more preventive maintenance may be called for. But if planned outages are the primary culprit interfering with greater system availability, then the frequency and duration of the preventive maintenance sessions may need to be reduced.
Why is system availability important?
Poor system availability can interfere with operations and employee productivity, and this can directly affect a company’s financial performance.
