Proactive IT / IS Monitoring for Business Continuity Planning

An organization fulfils its business objectives which initiate priorities for the current business processes as well as for their means of support which include gaining and processing information (data). Information systems are a significant means of support which are used by company in order to meet business objectives. Information systems are fully intended to support business processes. In order to gain this functionality, there are two aspects monitored, which are content and safety of the information system. Failure or shut-down of information system has an important influence on business processes realization or, in other words, has influence on business continuity. Existence of business continuity is important for every organization. It consists of planning failure recovery when the cause can be even the failure of computer network. Even though information system belongs to supporting tools from the view of main business processes, IT failure usually means stopping the whole operations. Therefore, the availability or unavailability has the main influence on business continuity. IT service continuity occurs when services are prepared, customized and robust, in order to be able to quickly react against possible failures by minimizing effects followed by rapid recovering of IT services. Therefore, it is required to identify threats of information system failures before it is too late. In order to detect abnormal statuses of information systems it is needed to perform appropriate measures in time. One of the possibilities to avoid failures of IT services in time is proactive monitoring. The text deals with the process of creating and verification of a model enabling creation of monitors according to customer requirements.