The Availability domain under SOC 2 evaluates whether systems are available for operation and use as committed or agreed, and whether disruptions are prevented, detected, and recovered from in a reliable manner.
Purpose of Availability
The Availability domain ensures that systems maintain operational integrity under all conditions. This trust domain determines whether availability is engineered, governed, and evidenced, not merely expected or assumed.
SOC 2 evaluates whether availability holds under stress, not just during normal operation. Auditors examine how organizations define commitments, build resilience, test recovery capabilities, and continuously monitor performance against stated objectives.
Core Evaluation Areas
Availability commitments are clearly defined and understood
Systems demonstrate resilience to failure and disruption
Recovery capabilities are tested and proven reliable
In theECIL framework, availability represents a trust promise that must be demonstrable over time through consistent operational evidence.
Availability Commitments & Service Objectives
Defined Commitments
Organizations must establish explicit availability commitments through Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). These commitments form the foundation of customer trust and set measurable targets for system availability.
Business Alignment
Technical availability objectives must align with business needs and customer expectations. This ensures that engineering efforts support actual business requirements rather than arbitrary technical targets.
Ownership & Governance
Clear ownership of availability targets is essential. Organizations must govern exceptions and trade-offs, ensuring that deviations from commitments are deliberate, documented, and managed appropriately.
Undefined commitments cannot be assured. Auditors evaluate whether availability expectations are explicit, measurable, and governed through formal processes.
This capability area focuses on whether systems are provisioned and managed to meet availability demands consistently. Effective capacity management prevents resource exhaustion before it impacts service delivery.
Availability failures often begin as capacity failures, when systems lack sufficient resources to handle demand, degradation and outages inevitably follow.
Capacity Planning & Forecasting
Predictive analysis of future resource needs based on growth trends, seasonal patterns, and business projections
Performance Monitoring & Thresholds
Continuous tracking of system performance with defined alert thresholds that trigger proactive intervention
Peak & Stress Management
Proven capability to handle peak load conditions and stress scenarios without service degradation
Resource Exhaustion Prevention
Controls and automation to prevent resource depletion across compute, storage, network, and application layers
This capability area evaluates whether systems are designed to withstand component failure without impacting service availability. Design resilience determines failure impact-systems must be architected from the ground up with redundancy and failover capabilities.
Component Redundancy
Critical system components are duplicated or distributed to ensure no single instance becomes a point of failure. Redundancy spans compute nodes, data stores, network paths, and supporting infrastructure.
Single Point Elimination
Systematic identification and elimination of single points of failure across the entire service delivery chain. This includes hardware, software, network, and human dependencies.
Resilient Architecture
Implementation of resilient design patterns including active-active configurations, automatic failover mechanisms, load balancing, and geographic distribution of services.
Validation Testing
Regular testing of redundancy and failover mechanisms through chaos engineering, failure injection, and disaster simulation exercises that prove resilience under real-world conditions.
Recovery capability is a fundamental availability control. This area examines whether systems and data can be restored within acceptable timeframes following disruption.
Backup without tested recovery is incomplete protection. Organizations must prove restoration works through regular testing and validation.
01
Backup Coverage
Comprehensive backup of availability-critical systems, applications, configurations, and data with appropriate frequency and retention
02
Recovery Objectives
Clearly defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) aligned with business requirements and customer commitments
03
Tested Procedures
Documented and regularly tested restoration procedures that prove systems can be recovered within defined objectives
04
Backup Integrity
Protection of backup data through encryption, access controls, immutability, and verification to ensure recoverability when needed
This capability area focuses on whether availability incidents are handled effectively and transparently. Availability incidents are trust incidents-how organizations detect, respond to, and communicate about service disruptions directly impacts customer confidence and regulatory compliance.
1
Detection
Rapid identification of service degradation and outages through monitoring, alerting, and automated detection systems that minimize time to awareness
2
Response
Coordinated incident response procedures that prioritize service restoration, engage appropriate teams, and execute documented recovery playbooks
3
Communication
Transparent stakeholder communication during availability-impacting incidents, including status updates, estimated resolution times, and customer notifications
4
Analysis
Post-incident root cause analysis and implementation of corrective actions to prevent recurrence and improve overall resilience
Every change that could impact availability undergoes thorough risk assessment. This includes evaluating potential failure modes, rollback requirements, and impact scope before implementation. Changes are categorized by risk level with appropriate approval workflows.
2
Controlled Deployment
Changes are deployed through controlled processes including staging environments, gradual rollouts, canary deployments, and feature flags. Rollback procedures are prepared and tested before production changes occur.
3
Post-Change Validation
After deployment, systems undergo validation testing and monitoring to confirm successful implementation. Key performance indicators and availability metrics are tracked to detect degradation early.
4
Degradation Monitoring
Enhanced monitoring during and after change windows detects subtle performance degradation or emerging issues. Automated alerts trigger investigation when metrics deviate from baseline expectations.
Change is a frequent cause of availability loss. Organizations must balance the need for innovation and improvement with the imperative to maintain service stability. This evaluation area determines whether change processes preserve system availability through rigorous controls.
Availability under SOC 2 aligns strongly with multiple regulatory and assurance frameworks, creating opportunities for integrated compliance approaches. Understanding these relationships helps organizations build cohesive control environments that satisfy multiple requirements simultaneously.
DORA Alignment
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) establishes operational resilience expectations for financial entities. SOC 2 Availability controls directly support DORA requirements for business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident management.
NIS2 Requirements
The Network and Information Security Directive 2 (NIS2) mandates service continuity for essential and important entities. SOC 2 Availability demonstrates capability to maintain operations and recover from disruptions as NIS2 requires.
ISO 27001 Controls
ISO/IEC 27001 Annex A includes continuity and availability controls that map directly to SOC 2 Availability criteria. Organizations can leverage SOC 2 evidence to support ISO 27001 certification and vice versa.
SOC 2 evaluates sustained availability performance over time, not isolated success during favorable conditions. This temporal dimension aligns with regulatory expectations for demonstrated, ongoing operational resilience.
Evidence supporting Availability must demonstrate operational continuity over time. Auditors assess patterns of behavior and sustained performance, not isolated incidents or anecdotal success stories.
Availability Metrics
Comprehensive uptime reports, availability percentages, and performance against SLA commitments over the audit period. Metrics must cover all availability-critical systems and services.
Capacity Dashboards
Capacity planning documentation, performance monitoring dashboards, and evidence of proactive resource management. Trend analysis showing capacity ahead of demand.
Incident Records
Complete incident and outage records including detection times, response actions, root causes, and corrective measures. Documentation of lessons learned and improvements implemented.
Recovery Testing
Backup and recovery test results demonstrating successful restoration within defined RTOs and RPOs. Evidence of regular testing cadence and documented procedures.
Change Documentation
Change and configuration management records showing controlled deployment processes. Documentation of rollback events and post-change validation results.
Understanding common failure patterns helps organizations proactively address vulnerabilities before they undermine customer trust and assurance credibility. These failures represent systemic weaknesses that auditors frequently identify.
1
Undefined Availability Targets
Organizations operate without explicit availability commitments or with unrealistic targets that cannot be sustained. This creates expectation mismatches and makes assurance evaluation impossible. Without defined objectives, there is no basis for measuring success.
2
Capacity Blind Spots
Inadequate capacity planning and monitoring lead to resource exhaustion and preventable outages. Organizations fail to forecast demand, ignore performance degradation signals, or lack visibility into resource utilization across the infrastructure stack.
3
Untested Recovery
Backup systems and disaster recovery procedures exist on paper but remain unvalidated through testing. When actual disruptions occur, organizations discover that recovery processes are incomplete, outdated, or fundamentally flawed.
4
Unmanaged Change
Availability degrades due to insufficiently controlled changes. Deployments occur without adequate testing, rollback planning, or post-change validation. Change becomes the leading cause of unplanned outages and service disruptions.
Use this page as a strategic resource to assess whether your availability commitments are defensible under audit scrutiny. Evaluate your current state against each capability area to identify gaps and prioritize improvements.
This content prepares organizations for both SOC 2 Type I (design evaluation) and Type II (operating effectiveness) audits by clarifying what auditors expect to see in terms of controls, evidence, and sustained performance.
Stakeholder Alignment
Leverage this framework to align resilience engineering efforts with assurance needs and business objectives. Use the capability areas to structure conversations with customers and auditors about availability posture.
Availability answers a core SOC 2 question: "Can customers rely on the system to be available as promised?" Your ability to demonstrate sustained availability performance determines the answer.