ATHOS: availability analysis and optimisation in SLAs

Information technology (IT) service availability is at the core of customer satisfaction and business success for today’s organisations. Many medium‐ to large‐size organisations outsource part of their IT services to external providers, with service‐level agreements describing the agreed availability of outsourced service components. Availability management of partially outsourced IT services is a non‐trivial task since classic approaches for calculating availability are not applicable, and IT managers can only rely on their expertise to fulfil it. This often leads to the adoption of non‐optimal solutions. In this paper we present ATHOS, a framework to calculate the availability of partially outsourced IT services in the presence of SLAs and to achieve a cost‐optimal choice of availability levels for outsourced IT components while guaranteeing a target availability level for the service. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.