A service-level agreement (SLA) typically specifies, among other metrics, the availability a service provider (SP) promises to a customer. In an optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network, connection-oriented provisioning is commonly based on whether the path's statistical availability complies with the SLA-requested availability. Because of the stochastic nature of network failures, the actually provisioned availability over a specific time period is subject to uncertainty, and hence the SLA is usually at risk. We consider this uncertainty and study provisioning to minimize SLA violations. We show that the SLA Violation Risk is affected by a number of factors (e.g., failure profiles, availability target, and penalty period), and hence cannot simply be characterized by statistical path availability. We formulate the problem of risk-aware provisioning in WDM mesh networks, where path selection is dictated by SLA Violation Risk. In particular, we focus on devising an efficient scheme capable of computing path(s) that are likely to successfully accommodate the SLA-requested availability. A novel technique is applied to convert links with heterogeneous failure profiles to reference links that capture the main risk features in a relative manner. Based on the “reference link” concept, our Risk-Aware Provisioning scheme uses only limited failure information. We also extend our Risk-Aware Provisioning to use shared-path protection (SPP) for connections with strict availability requirements. We evaluate the performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes in terms of SLA violation ratio compared to the generic availability-aware approaches.