| Availability Manager: | | The role of our Availability Manager is to document the correct layers of security and privacy needed to deliver in the most cost effective way, the levels of service defined in the SLA. | | Availability happens by design, people may wish for 100% availability, but that would cost many millions and may not be cost justified. | | Data quality can also impact availability as bad data is worse than no data, inconsistent data is a real liability that cannot be trusted. |
| Application Availability: | | Different parts of a service have very different availability requirements. | | We could envisage a news broadcast application that was not critical to a business and could go down for a day with negligible impact. | | All focus can be put into just those part of a service that are critical to the business so the right lavel of availability can be delivered. |
| Availability Zones: | | Legal obligations demand that data centers are located in zones with agreed data storeage regulations. | | We have data centers in many locations, but data availability will restrict the availability of specific data objects to specific zones. |
| Service Level Agreement: | | See terms to reference that SLA applicable to each application service. | | Availability is maximized for each application service. |
| | | Data Retention Policy: | | With due regard to specific business requirements, a blanket data retention policy is applied for conformance with Data Protection Act (DPA) regulation. | | Data will NOT be deleted by users, no online facilities are provided that enable business data to be manually deleted. | | Data will be automatically deleted according to published data life cycle rules. | | In general, data shall be retained in archives where it cannot be deleted or lost, but can be quickly retrieved for a period of seven years after it is last used (changed) by a normal prosiness procedure. | | A common strategy is to archive data by calendar year to make data ameanable to search and retrieval. |
| Data Centers: | | Application services operate from at least 2 and normally 3 remote data centers. | | In the event that one data is not available for any reason, another data center will be able to take on the application service and deliver a continuation of the business application service. | | Data is continually replicated from one data center to another, but in the event that a one data center should fail, some transactions that were in progress at the time of the failure will not have been completed and will be lost. | | Other data centers will be able to deliver business continuity with data that was complete and correct at a time just before the equipment failure took place. |
| Measurement: | | A key role of our Availability Manager is the measure what a service consists of and what resources those components use. | | Service measurement and service reporting are integrated into many tasks that are undertaken by our Availability Manager. | | Continual improvement needs a solid metric to measure improvements against - it is the role of the Availability Manager to provide thos metrics. |
| Data Replication: | | An encoded message switch facility continually streams data from one data center database to others in other locations. | | The effect is that in the event of a disaster in one location, a data center in another physical location will be able to take over a continue the application service with the minimum of disruption. | | From time to time applications are switched from one data center to another without people noticing the switch. | | Periodically (monthly) copies of data are taken and copied to spinning hard disk archives as an extra layer of protection. | | Upon request, a CD or DVD copy of application data may be created for a customer - it is understood that disk media may not survive five-years before some corruption is detected. |
| Business Impact Analysis: | | BIA is documented to identify the cost balance to provide the right level of recovery and restart technology. |
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