Abstrait

INFORMATION AVAILABILITY: COMPONENTS, THREATS AND PROTECTION MECHANISMS

Suhail Qadir Mir, Mehraj-ud-din Dar, S M K Quadri,Bilal Maqbool Beig

This paper presents a review of the major components of the Information Availability and also in a dynamic scenario the major threats to Information Availability are identified and steps needed to counter them are also discussed. The threats to Information Availability exist everywhere with some doing it deliberately (deliberate-authorised and deliberate-unauthorised) and some are accidental. These are difficult to specifically protect against; the best that can be done is to establish a good baseline level for IT security. Availability can be compromised or challenged on a single user desktop system (PC) or a major Internet Communication pathway or at any single point or collection of points in between. With such a great risk to Information Availability and the dependence of organizations on Information, proper steps should be taken to ensure the Availability of Information and its critical resources. There is no one stop solution for Countering the attacks but systems and networks can be engineered to provide a level of security where we can say that the information is safe .