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Chapter 5 ■ Service Design
business, business activities cannot function. So the customer would want to be ensured
that IT service continuity process is shielding its IT service. The service provider should
have built servers, databases, and applications (maybe something like a stripped-down
version) and have set up a real-time replication in another data center located in another
city. So if the main data center were to go down, the traffic for e-mail services would
switch automatically to the backup data center located in the other city, and the customer
could keep working as though there were no drop in IT services. The IT service continuity
is what the customer gets by enrolling in the process and paying a special premium for it.
IT service continuity, or disaster recovery (DR) as it is popularly known, will not
come into play unless there is an incident that cannot be resolved within the SLA. It is
enacted only when resolution seems unlikely and most definitely when disaster strikes.
5.7.7.1 Scope of IT Service Continuity Management
As mentioned earlier, ITSCM comes into the picture only if disaster strikes. Normal
outages that can be resolved within the SLA and maybe just outside it are dealt with
through the incident management process.
The scope of IT services that needs to be protected from disasters is not a decision
that the service provider makes. It has to come from the business. The business, on
the other hand, may not know the various IT services that are important to it. They
would only know the business services that are critical for them. The business would
have a process to cater to disasters, and this process is called the business continuity
management (BCM). The BCM will give insight into which business services are critical to
the customer, and the IT service provider will map critical IT services based on the critical
business services. This is illustrated in the ITSCM lifecycle in Figure 5-12.
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