Data Availability

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What Does Data Availability Mean?

Data availability is the process of ensuring that data is available to end users and applications, when and where they need it. It defines the degree or extent to which data is readily usable along with the necessary IT and management procedures, tools and technologies required to enable, manage and continue to make data available.

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Techopedia Explains Data Availability

Data availability is primarily used to create service level agreements (SLA) and similar service contracts, which define and guarantee the service provided by third-party IT service providers. Typically, data availability calls for implementing products, services, policies and procedures that ensure that data is available in normal and even in disaster recovery operations. This is usually done by implementing data/storage redundancy, data security, network optimization, data security and more. Storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage and RAID-based storage systems are popular storage management technologies for ensuring data availability.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.