The checklist for the capture of requirements is as follows:

• Ability to have mission critical systems with a percentage uptime of X, for example, 99.2% per month. Critical systems are defined as:
  • Ad placement (storefront, paper production, auto-publish, bulk upload)
  • Core search
  • Transactions
  • Ad management (renew)
  • Notifications
  • Lead generation
• Ability to have non-mission critical systems with a percentage uptime of X, for example, 98.3% per month.
• Ability to schedule downtime for maintenance on the site and/or components/systems
• Have the key stakeholders signed-off the availability requirements?
• Are the requirements driven by business goals and needs?
• Can requirements be met by the selected software and hardware platform?
• Are the strategies for business continuity and disaster recovery defined?
• Do stakeholders have realistic expectations pertaining to unplanned downtime?
• Do requirements consider different classes of service?
• Do requirements strike a balance between business goals and cost?
• Do requirements take into account future business needs such as moving to a longer day?
• What is the business/financial cost for a one minute outage?
• How much of an outage is acceptable?
• Are scheduled outages tolerable?
• Do availability requirements consider batch availability and online?
• Do requirements take into account variations, such as period end?
• What are industry and domain benchmarks for availability?
• What are end users' availability expectations based on surveys?
• What is the maximum timeframe before which the business is severely impacted? This helps in understanding RTO.
• What is the acceptable data loss? This helps in understanding RPO.
• Are there analyst recommendations for application availability?
• What is the business/financial cost for a one minute outage?
• What is the maximum time period before which the business is severely impacted? This helps in understanding RTO.
• Are there any analyst recommendations for application availability?
• What is the acceptable data loss? This helps us in understanding RPO.
• How much of an outage is tolerable?
• What are end users availability expectations based on surveys?
• Are scheduled outages acceptable?

The checklist for architecture definition are as follows:

• Is emphasis given to restoring data from incomplete or corrupt backups?
• Does the application respond elegantly to faults, including logging and reporting them appropriately?
• Does the solution establish the time needed to recover from failure?
• Does the backup technique provide transactional integrity of restored data?
• Does the target architecture meet the availability requirements?
• Does the backup support online backup, with acceptable degradation in performance?
• Is a standby site defined, if appropriate? Is the standby site identical to the primary site or with reduced performance?
• Have you established the mechanisms to switch from production to the standby site?
• Is the impact of the availability solution on performance assessed and acceptable?
• Is the architecture evaluated for bottlenecks, single points of failure, and other weaknesses?
• Does the fault tolerant model extend to all vulnerable entities in the landscape?