Availability indicates that data and services are available when needed. For some organizations, this simply means that the data and services must be available between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. For other organizations, this means they must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Organizations commonly implement redundancy and fault-tolerant methods to ensure high levels of availability for key systems. Additionally, organizations ensure systems stay up to date with current patches to ensure that software bugs don’t affect their availability.
Redundancy and Fault Tolerance
Redundancy adds duplication to critical systems and provides fault tolerance. If a critical component has a fault, the duplication provided by the redundancy allows the service to continue without interruption. In other words, a system with fault tolerance can suffer a fault, but tolerate it and continue to operate.
A common goal of fault tolerance and redundancy techniques is to remove each single point of failure (SPOF). If an SPOF fails, the entire system can fail. For example, if a server has a single drive, the drive is an SPOF because its failure takes down the server.
Chapter 9 of the CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-401 Study Guide covers many fault-tolerance and redundancy techniques in more depth. As an introduction, here are some common examples:
- Disk redundancies. Fault-tolerant disks such as RAID-1 (mirroring) and RAID-5 (striping with parity) allow a system to continue to operate even if a disk fails.
- Server redundancies. Failover clusters include redundant servers and ensure a service will continue to operate, even if a server fails. In a failover cluster, the service switches from the failed server in a cluster to an operational server in the same cluster. Virtualization can also increase availability of servers by reducing unplanned downtime. Chapter 5 of the CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-401 Study Guide covers virtualization in more depth.
- Load balancing. Load balancing uses multiple servers to support a single service, such as a high-volume web site. It can increase the availability of web sites and web-based applications.
- Site redundancies. If a site can no longer function due to a disaster, such as a fire, flood, hurricane, or earthquake, the organization can move critical systems to an alternate site. The alternate site can be a hot site (ready and available 24/7), a cold site (a location where equipment, data, and personnel can be moved to when needed), or a warm site (a compromise between a hot site and cold site).
- Backups. If personnel back up important data, they can restore it if the original data is lost. Data can be lost due to corruption, deletion, application errors, human error, and even hungry gremlins that just randomly decide to eat your data. Without data backups, data is lost forever after any one of these incidents.
- Alternate power. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) and power generators can provide power to key systems even if commercial power fails.
- Cooling systems. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems improve the availability of systems by reducing outages from overheating.
Availability ensures that systems are up and operational when needed and often addresses single points of failure. You can increase availability by adding fault tolerance and redundancies, such as RAID, failover clusters, backups, and generators. HVAC systems also increase availability.
Patching
Another method of ensuring systems stay available is with patching. Software bugs cause a wide range of problems, including security issues and even random crashes. When software vendors discover the bugs, they develop and release code that patches or resolves these problems. Organizations commonly implement patch management programs to ensure that systems stay up to date with current patches. Chapter 5 of the CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-401 Study Guide covers patching and patch management in greater depth.
Security+ Availability Practice Question and Answer
Your organization recently implemented two servers that act as failover devices for each other. Which security goal is your organization pursuing?
A. Safety
B. Integrity
C. Confidentiality
D. Availability
Answer D is correct. Your organization is pursuing availability.
A failover cluster uses redundant servers to ensure a service will continue to operate even if one of the servers fail.
Safety methods provide safety for personnel and other assets.
Integrity methods ensure that data has not been modified.
Confidentiality methods such as encryption prevent the unauthorized disclosure of data.
Understanding Core Security Goals
Availability (this page)
Congrats on the pass.
You’re on target with your understanding. Both provide increased availability but do so differently.
Here is a little bit more that is outside of the Security+ ring of knowledge.
Load balancing is generally used to improve scalability. In other words, it’s relatively easy to add additional servers to the load balancing cluster during times of increased load. This provides increased availability during periods of increased load (instead of the servers crashing or slowing to a crawl).
Failover clusters are primarily used to increase availability. Consider a basic two-node cluster used to increase availability of databases hosted on a database server. Availability is provided if the primary node fails. Only one node is active at any time, and both nodes are never available at the same time so the failover cluster does not provide any scalability.
This post might help a little too: https://blogs.getcertifiedgetahead.com/security-redundancy/
Good luck with the SSCP.
Hi Darril,
I’m not sure this is the right place to post. I’ve passed the sec+ exam but doing some revision for the SSCP exam. Please what’s the key difference failover clustering and load balancing. I struggled to differentiate them during my preparation for the Sec+ exam and I think it’s not still very clear to me. Below is my what I think:
Failover clustering: includes redundant servers that may not be necessarily active/online
Load balancing – all servers are active and ready to share the load based on an algorithm of some sort such as round-robin, etc
Thanks,
G