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Requirements: Availability

Availability ensures that systems, services, and data remain accessible when needed — and losing it can mean lost customers, revenue, and trust. This content covers what availability means in IT contexts and why maintaining it is a core infrastructure priority.

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About this video

Availability is one of the foundational principles in IT and cybersecurity, referring to the ability of systems, services, and data to be accessed and used when required. It applies broadly — to websites, file servers, communication channels, and any other technology resource that users or processes depend on. When availability breaks down, even briefly, the downstream effects can be immediate and tangible, from missed communications to halted operations. For organizations, the business impact of poor availability is significant. Customers expect consistent access to services, and repeated outages erode confidence quickly, often driving users to competing providers. The resulting losses extend beyond reputation — downtime translates directly into lost revenue and reduced profitability. This is why high availability is not simply a technical goal but a business-critical requirement that shapes how networks, infrastructure, and systems are designed and maintained. Professionals responsible for architecting IT environments must account for availability from the ground up, implementing redundancy, failover mechanisms, and monitoring strategies that minimize unplanned downtime. Understanding availability as a core concept is essential groundwork for anyone working in IT operations, systems administration, or cybersecurity.

What you'll learn

Explain the concept of availability as it applies to IT systems, resources, and services, and describe the business impact of availability failures.

What's covered

Availability

Definition
- Quality of being usable
- Not technology specific
Types of Resources
- Files
- Services
- Network infrastructure
Availability Failure Example
- Communication lines down
- Message not received timely
- Missed meeting update
Business Impact
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Customer loss
- Revenue and profit loss
High Availability Goals
- Minimize downtime
- Architect reliable systems

Key terms

Availability: The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
High Availability: High Availability describes systems designed to operate continuously with minimal downtime, achieved through redundancy, failover clustering, and load balancing to meet the Availability pillar of the CIA triad.
Downtime: The period during which a system, service, or component is unavailable or non-operational; it is measured against uptime targets defined in service agreements.

Topics

Availability System Reliability Infrastructure Business Continuity Cia Triad Uptime

Transcript

What Availability Means

Have you ever got onto a browser and navigated to a website only to find out that that website is down? That is availability, or lack of availability.

Availability is not a technology specific word. It just means the quality of being able to be used or obtained. So when we're trying to get to a website, that website is available. And it could be any resource — it could be a file, it could be some sort of service, it could be really anything. And since we're talking technology here, anything technology related.

So here's our example again, where Susan is sending David a message. Let's say the communication lines are not available when this message is sent, so David does not receive that message in a timely manner. That makes it unavailable, and this could be problematic, because now David doesn't get the updated time for the meeting.

Why It Matters

So when we're architecting our networks and our infrastructure and our systems, we probably want to incorporate some sort of availability, or high availability, to make sure it's up and running and we don't have downtime.

I found that availability is one of the most critical things to maintain, because if you don't have availability, customers get angry, and they'll get angry fast. And if they do that enough, if you have enough downtime, enough availability issues, they'll just quit the service, and you'll lose customers, you'll lose money, you'll lose revenue, your profits will go down. And so it's really important to maintain a level of availability.

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