Availability

Availability=

Availability of information refers to ensuring that authorized parties are able to access the information when needed.

Information only has value if the right people can access it at the right times. Denying access to information has become a very common attack nowadays. Almost every week you can find news about high profile websites being taken down by DDoS attacks. The primary aim of DDoS attacks is to deny users of the website access to the resources of the website. Such downtime can be very costly. Other factors that could lead to lack of availability to important information may include accidents such as power outages or natural disasters such as floods.

Availability is best ensured by rigorously maintaining all hardware, performing hardware repairs immediately when needed, providing a certain measure of redundancy and failover, providing adequate communications bandwidth and preventing the occurrence ofbottlenecks, implementing emergency backup power systems, keeping current with all necessary system upgrades, and guarding against malicious actions such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.