This paper develops a framework to support multiple protection strategies in optical networks, which is in general applicable to any connection-oriented network. The capacity available on a link for routing primary and backup connections are computed depending on the protection strategy. The paper also develops a model for computing service outage and failure recovery times for a connection where notifications of failure location are broadcast in the network. The effectiveness of employing multiple protection strategies is established by studying the performance of three networks for traffic with four types of protection requirement.