Availability is one of the three basic principles of the CIA triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) Organizations should implement policies that protect the company’s IT assets in terms of security. The policy must also allow seamless access and availability of the services to customers and shareholders. The topics of security and availability are closely related because a cybersecurity incident could cause downtimes or worse for the business.

Focusing on availability, the first thing that comes to mind is load balancing and highly-available hosting. The company should implement load balancing practices such as floating IP’s and keepalived for maximum uptime. Another avenue would be to set up and maintain a monitoring system such as an ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or Zabbix. These kinds of systems are very configurable and can monitor just about any type of data. Finally, redundancy servers can be added so that these backup servers can host everything when downtime is needed.

In terms of cybersecurity, DDoS protection is essential as well as some type of enterprise antivirus program that is installed on workstations and reports to the monitoring system.