IT Service Continuity Management
IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) in ITSM is defined as the ability of a business to continue to satisfy pre-determined Service Level Agreements after a business interruption. A business interruption could be a system outage or the loss of an entire business site. ITSCM deals with major disasters and (prolonged) system failures with high cost of downtime. Routine failures are not considered business interruptions, but are addressed by Availability Management.
As businesses become more reliant on IT, continued availability of IT is critical to a company’s survival. Increasingly, a large percentage of a company’s market capitalization is linked to intellectual property that is stored digital format on IT systems. Therefore, a pro-active approach to IT Service Continuity Management, including IT asset and IT data protection, is now a fiduciary responsibility and Directors who do not take this task seriously are personally liable.
Defining the ITSCM strategy starts with conducting a thorough assessment of all the potential risks threatening continuity and by systematically designing ways to mitigate these risks. Risks that should be taken into account range from loss of physical IT systems and loss of network connectivity to loss of data. There are a wide range of systems and methods available to mitigate these risks: from redundant hardware configurations such as RAID arrays, mirrored or clustered systems, daily backups and a fully redundant disaster recovery data center. No matter what continuity solution is deployed, it is critical to monitor and validate that the Service Continuity infrastructure is functioning properly.
Log data can provide such assurance that the continuity infrastructure is in place and ready for action by monitoring error messages, activity levels and confirmation of successful procedures such as daily backups.