The goal of service level management is to achieve and implement mutually intelligible agreements on IT services between their provider and customer. Such agreements should be based on an understanding of the needs of the customer, the capabilities of the supplier's technical means and the available financial resources. Service level management issues include optimizing services to deliver them to customers at affordable prices based on the precise definition of SLA agreements, monitoring services, and supporting services with external providers.
IT financial management deals with the economics of IT service provision, such as emerging costs, cost-to-revenue accounting for IT infrastructure changes, and cost forecasting and tracking. Financial management increases the awareness of IT management and the company about costs and can be used in the preparation of the IT budget. ITIL 4 Foundation PDF book also describes the different methods of billing for IT services and pricing, as well as various aspects of IT financing.
The purpose of capacity management is to optimize the cost, acquisition time, and deployment of the IT resources required to meet customer agreements. Capacity management is closely related to other processes such as resource management, performance management, IT demand management, modeling, capacity planning, load management, and sizing of the hardware needed to run applications. One important aspect of capacity management is the planning required to ensure consistent levels of service now and in the future.
IT Service Continuity Management is the preparation and planning of how IT Service Providers will respond to emergencies, a process that focuses on the links between all components needed to protect business continuity in the event of an emergency (such as disasters) and the means to prevent such situations. IT Service Continuity Management is the process of planning and coordinating the technical, financial, and management resources needed to ensure service continuity after disasters.
Availability management is the process of ensuring that resources are allocated in such a way as to be able to fulfill the agreements with the customer. Availability management issues include service optimization and incident minimization (which will be discussed below).