IT & Security Data Information Technology Risk Management

The CIA Triad for Business Executives: Understanding Availability (Part Three)

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Part Three

In the first two parts of this series, we explored Confidentiality (keeping sensitive information private) and Integrity (ensuring data remains accurate and trustworthy). Now we turn to Availability, the principle that ensures systems and data are accessible when you need them.

For business leaders, availability is the engine that keeps operations running. When systems go down, productivity stalls, customers wait, revenue slows, and teams scramble – meaning downtime is both inconvenient and expensive.

Why Availability Matters to Executives

From ERP platforms to email, file storage, phones, and cloud apps, availability ensures that the tools your teams rely on remain up and running. If confidentiality protects what’s private, and integrity protects what’s true, availability protects your ability to operate.

Even short outages can have real consequences:

  • A sales team can’t access a CRM before a major renewal call
  • A manufacturing line halts because a system loses connection
  • A financial controller can’t run payroll due to a server issue
  • Customer support phones go down during peak hours

Many availability failures are small issues that ripple into business-wide disruption: expired certificates, unpatched systems, a misconfigured cloud permission, or a single overloaded server.

Availability is ultimately about keeping the business moving. The following sections outline how to do so.

1. Build Redundancy Into Critical Systems

No system should have a single point of failure, especially those tied to revenue, communication, or customer commitments.

Executives should ensure critical systems have:

  • Backup servers or cloud instances that can take over automatically
  • Network redundancy, such as secondary internet circuits or SD-WAN  (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) failover
  • Backup communication channels, especially for phone systems and VoIP
  • Load balancing, so demand is spread across resources

Redundancy is like having a generator for your home — you hope you never need it, but you’ll be grateful it’s there when the lights go out.

2. Ensure Your Backups Actually Work

Backup failures are one of the most common and preventable availability risks.

A reliable backup strategy includes:

  • Routine backups of systems, applications, and critical documents
  • Offsite or cloud backups to protect against physical damage or local failures
  • Regular test restores to confirm backups actually function
  • Version history, allowing recovery from accidental deletion or ransomware

Executives often assume backups are handled “somewhere in IT,” but the strategy behind them benefits from leadership visibility. A backup that can’t be restored when it counts only appears safe, but isn't true protection.

3. Plan for the Unplanned

Outages will happen even with strong security and modern cloud tools. What matters is how quickly you can recover.

A strong Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan ensures:

  • Teams know what to do during an outage
  • Communication continues, even if primary systems fail
  • Alternate work processes are ready (e.g., manual billing, fallback phone lines)
  • Recovery steps are documented and practiced

Executives play a critical role here: supporting drills, prioritizing investments, and ensuring the organization takes preparedness seriously. Without that readiness, even small incidents can escalate into costly, business-disrupting crises.

Availability Creates Business Stability

Ultimately, availability is the practical expression of an organization’s preparedness. It’s where good design, disciplined processes, and executive support converge to keep the business running no matter what. By investing in the right tools, testing them, and aligning teams around shared expectations, organizations can move from reactive firefighting to confident, continuous operations. 

When confidentiality, integrity, and availability work together, organizations gain a resilient foundation for growth. Availability ensures teams stay productive, customers are served without interruption, leaders can make decisions without delay, security issues are contained quickly, and the business can withstand unexpected events. Strong availability practices protect productivity, revenue, and reputation.

How PulseOne Can Help

PulseOne helps organizations evaluate the availability of their systems, strengthen resiliency, and build continuity plans that protect operations from outages, cyber incidents, and unexpected failures. If you’re ready to strengthen system availability across your organization,  contact PulseOne  to turn strategy into action.

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PulseOne is a business services company delivering information technology IT management solutions to small and mid-sized businesses for over 20 years. In short, we’re your “get IT done” people.

We are passionate about the power of PEOPLE and TECHNOLOGY to transform a company. We are confident we can significantly accelerate your PROGRESS towards your business technology objectives.

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