Capacity, in the IT business environment, is defined as the measure of the sufficiency of the IT infrastructure to handle volume within performance objectives. Scalability is a related measure of an IT asset’s ability to rapidly and readily accommodate volume requests. This questionnaire outlines business risks and leading practices for capacity and scalability.

Failure to manage capacity and scalability risk can have the following impacts: service failures or performance degradations due to lack of capacity; the architecture may break down under increased workloads, leading to an inability to support usage spikes or new business solutions; and more.