Availability is the Foundation

The perfectly available system is right there whenever your users need it, wherever they are.  It responds consistently and quickly, regardless of time of day or year.

Key Questions

• What is the most appropriate availability goal for your situation?
• How do you know what your current availability is?
• What is driving this availability?

Determine The Goal

There is no end to what you can spend in the pursuit of availability.  Redundant hardware, hot sites, geo-diverse hosting, full scale application load simulation...  In this sea of choices, how do you know what activities have a reasonable return on your investment? 

We work with the stakeholders in your organization to identify and express your availability goals in a way that everyone understands.  This process illuminates what the impact of availability problems are to the business, customers, and employees.  We also map how this picture varies over the course of the day, week and year. 

Know where you are

How do you know how available you are?  When there's a problem, how do you find out?  Most organizations have great difficulty knowing enough about how available systems really are and what is driving that reliability.  It's easy to assume that the surface item that caused the last outage is the most important thing to be addressed because there aren't reliable, impassionate metrics and other facts to base an analysis on.

We work with you to move beyond reactive management  to a deliberate understanding of how to measure where you are and why.  Sometimes the answer to "What are we going to do to ensure this doesn't happen again?" is nothing - it was an expected outcome of deliberate decisions in risk management that were made transparently in the organization.  In an environment like this, post-outage recriminations instead become useful after-outage reviews that drive progress forward.

Methodically Improve

Your system is only available when all of the components (infrastructure, software, and processes) come together. This means you're only as good as your weakest link.  Investments need to be balanced between each of the areas to ensure that advances made in one area aren't canceled out by issues in another.

Preserve Availability over Time

We believe that it isn't enough to solve the immediate problem in front of you.  We work to include in every project activities to preserve and improve results over time so that your investment continues to improve in value.