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Chapter 5 ■ Service Design
a day-to-day basis. Other examples include broadband Internet data usage, minutes on
your mobile phone, and bandwidth usage of your web sites.
This subprocesses also keeps an eye on the performance of capacities and its related
SLAs as agreed to with the customer. On an agreed term, service capacities are measured
and reported back to the service-level management process and to the customer. It also
aids business capacity management in predicting future capacity requirements.
5.7.6.2.3 Component Capacity Management
The innermost layer in capacity management is the component capacity management. It
deals with the capacities of individual components that make up the service. It deals with
the management of the individual components and places control mechanisms around it.
Just as in services, automated thresholds are placed to ensure there is a warning
before the storm. Examples could include the warning message from a storage server
when it reaches 80% disk capacity. Let’s say that the storage management group ignores
it, and when it reaches 90%, it sends out an exception alert. Still no response at 95%, so
it triggers an incident, which will force the teams to act on it at the earliest. This is the
reactive phase that I was referring to earlier. This is the reality today. Teams don’t gear up
before the storm, but rather take corrective measures when the storm is about to hit.
5.7.7 IT Service Continuity Management
IT is the lifeline for all of us today, and living without it is unthinkable. Whether we deal
with communicating with people, medical operations and scans, entertainment, or even
the day-to-day work we perform, in one form or another, they are all connected somehow
to IT. So it is imperative that IT services provide some kind of insurance, which does not
deal with penalties and compensation, but rather a ring of resilience outside the normal
resilience discussed in the availability management process.
IT services come in all shapes and sizes, mainly from the criticality perspective.
Not all IT services are equally critical. IT service continuity management (ITSCM) is
expensive, so it mainly covers critical services. For example, a customer dealing with a
call center leverages on telephony and Internet from a service provider. For his business,
telephony would be a critical IT service considering he is in the business of making and
receiving calls. For another customer who is in the business of content writing for blogs,
Internet would be a critical IT service, but telephony would not be critical. So, how does
the service provider decide which IT services to take into the ring of an additional layer of
resilience and which ones to leave out?
It’s simple really. The service provider doesn’t have to make that choice. It asks the
customer to pick out critical services, and the customer would be firmed up with the IT
service continuity process. I will discuss the entire process in the next section.
So what exactly is this resilience that I am talking about, you might ask?
Suppose a customer obtains e-mail service from a service provider. The servers
hosting the e-mail IT infrastructure, database, and applications are in a single data center
in one part of the city. Let’s say that this part of the city gets flooded, or gets hit by a riot
or earthquake, and the data center as a result becomes inaccessible or powered down.
The business still has to continue. And without e-mails, as the critical service for this
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