Which term refers to systems that are designed to stay operational and accessible?

High Availability refers to systems that are designed to remain operational and accessible with minimal downtime. In a high availability setup, the goal is to ensure that critical services are consistently up and running, even in the face of hardware failures, power outages, or other disruptions. Techniques employed in high availability systems often include clustering, load balancing, and failover mechanisms that automatically redirect traffic to functioning servers or resources when issues arise.

This approach is vital in environments where uptime is critical, such as financial institutions, healthcare systems, and e-commerce platforms. By ensuring that systems are redundant and can recover quickly from failures, organizations can provide uninterrupted service to users, which is a core aspect of high availability.

In contrast, fault tolerance refers to the ability of a system to continue functioning correctly even in the event of a failure within one or more components, which may not always ensure availability if the entire system goes down. Redundancy involves having additional components or systems to increase reliability but does not specifically guarantee continuous access without failover measures. Affordability relates to cost and does not address operational capabilities or accessibility.