What are system availability controls in a business resiliency plan? This BAR exam lesson explains system availability controls — the second of the four components of business resiliency — covering physical controls, IT infrastructure controls, redundancies, and backup strategies that keep critical systems running or quickly recoverable during an outage. Built for accounting students and CPA, CMA and EA candidates studying business resiliency and IT risk.

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Video Timeline & Key Concepts:
0:00 — Introduction
0:39 — System availability controls as the second component of a business resiliency plan
2:06 — Physical controls: barriers, biometric access, environmental controls, fire suppression
4:05 — IT infrastructure controls: multi-factor authentication, role-based access, logs, encryption
7:49 — Redundancies: hardware, power (UPS/generators), network, and geographically diverse data centers
10:31 — Backup files: full, incremental, and differential backups
17:06 — Why these controls matter for the CPA exam

Frequently Asked Questions:

What are system availability controls?

They are the safeguards that ensure critical systems stay operational or can be recovered quickly after a disaster or outage, and they form the second of the four components of a business resiliency plan.

What is the difference between incremental and differential backups?

An incremental backup captures only the changes made since the last backup of any kind, while a differential backup captures all changes made since the last full backup.

Why are redundancies important for system availability?

Redundancies duplicate critical components so that if one fails, another can immediately take over, preventing a single point of failure from causing a full outage.

What are examples of physical controls?

Physical controls include walls and fences, biometric access systems, environmental controls for temperature and humidity, and fire suppression systems that protect the physical infrastructure.

Why use geographically diverse data centers?

Spreading data centers across different locations ensures that a localized disaster, such as a fire or regional power failure, cannot take down every copy of a critical system at once.

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