A failure information acquirer of a network service management apparatus acquires, from a network system, a VNF failure recovery permission request and makes an inquiry to a virtualized infrastructure manager about a state of corresponding hardware to determine a cause of a failure. A recovery process controller grants, when the failure is caused by software, the network system recovery permission, and requests, when the failure is caused by hardware, the virtualized infrastructure manager to cause state information on a corresponding virtual machine to indicate an error and then grants the recovery permission.