The vast majority of extended service interruptions are caused by relatively isolated events, such as hardware or software failures, not major events, such as natural disasters. The challenge is recognizing when and how to escalate those incidents, and when to activate DR procedures.
- IT leaders can fall victim to the “IT hero” and the familiar refrain of “I just need five more minutes to fix this,” and wait too long to failover to a standby system or hot site.
- Similarly, if there is a local power or network outage, and maintenance crews estimate a couple hours to repair the problem, do you wait or start preparing to failover to standby systems or a DR hot site?
The solution is to better integrate service management and DR processes. To that end, this template provides a framework for updating severity definitions and response times to meet DR requirements.