1 Abstract— System and application availability continues to be a fundamental characteristic of IT services. In recent years the IT Operations team at Wolters Kluwer’s CT Corporation has placed special focus on this area. Using a combination of goals, metrics, processes, organizational models, communication methods, corrective maintenance, root cause analysis, preventative engineering, automated alerting, and workflow automation significant progress has been made in meeting availability SLAs (Service Level Agreements). This paper presents the background of this work, approach, details of its implementation, and results. A special focus is provided on the use of a classical ITIL view as operationalized in an Agile and DevOps environment. Index Terms—System Availability, Software Reliability, ITIL, Workflow Automation, Process Engineering, Production Support, Customer Support, Product Support, Change Management, Release Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Organizational Design, Scrum, Agile, DevOps, Service Level Agreements, Software Measurement, Microsoft SharePoint. I. INTRODUCTION or any company running a computing infrastructure and software applications an assumption and requirement is that those systems and applications are available at the time that users and customers need them. In years past systems often ran during business hours but not “overnight”. However, in the current environment of global business and Internet commerce there really is no overnight anymore. What might be night time in one city or country is morning or noon time in another. Thus the requirements for availability have been increasing along the dimension of market or regional access. In addition, the demands for reliable computing availability or uptime has also been increasing. With major web sites available around the clock and around the world without any downtime the standards for uptime have forced themselves upward even for internal applications and not just customer facing systems. For CT Corporation these increasing demands around system and application availability are no different. Over the last 10 years CT has made increasing investments in the engineering, process support, and team strength to meet and manage defined SLAs (Service Level Agreements) across each application in its portfolio. Starting in 2008 the CT Operations team began putting in place the practices, tools, processes, engineering, communications, and organizational approaches required to boost availability and meet or surpass our negotiated SLAs [1]. With rare exceptions, we have been able to achieve this. In this paper, we will detail the origins of this work, the incremental progress made to achieve these results, the specifics of some of the methods, and the outline of the quantified results. But first a brief introduction of Wolters Kluwer. Wolters Kluwer (WK) is a €4.3B Netherlands-based international publisher and digital information services provider with operations around the world. Wolters Kluwer is organized into Divisions and Business Units. The experience documented here focuses on work done for New York-based CT Corporation (CT). The CT IT Operations team is a part of Wolters Kluwer’s Global Business Services organization dedicated to supporting the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Division. The systems operated by CT include public-facing Web-based applications and internally used ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. Major vendors manage network services and hosting for our computing environments. CT IT is responsible for the development and operations of these systems from an end customer standpoint. It is the CT IT Operations team which has been primarily responsible for the availability processes and tools documented here although multiple parties contributed to the achievement of these results. The systems and applications SLA management work reflected here benefits our customers directly by providing acceptable uptimes and issue response times for our systems. They also help our development organization by isolating troubleshooting and problem resolution to allow them to focus a greater portion of their time on new product development. This work also reduces costs, improves flexibility, and speeds system evolution by allowing for rapid adaptation in the face of technical or process issues. Achieving and Managing Availability SLAs with ITIL Driven Processes, DevOps, and Workflow Tools James J. Cusick, PMP CSO, Director & IT Services Tower Lead for GRC IT Global Business Services, Wolters Kluwer, New York, NY j.cusick@computer.org F