Our mission is to provide disaster recovery planning for 100+ Administrative Applications and 100+ Administrative Servers that Administrative Systems supports centrally. Infrastructure diagrams show that in our highly integrated environments, one server can impact many business services.

Business Continuity

If a system is down, departments should have plans for continuing to do business.

• Best Practices: In an effort to help our business community prepare for a disaster, we have provided the following:
  • Departmental Business Continuity Guide
  • Departmental Business Continuity Worksheets
    • Facilities Business Continuity Plan 2003
    • Placement Business Continuity Plan 2003
    • Payroll Business Continuity Plan 2003
    • Procurement Business Continuity Plan 2003
    • Treasury Services Business Continutity Plan 2003
  • Disaster Recovery Service Level Agreement
• If your department has prepared a business continuity plan, we'd like to post it here to share with others. Please send email to the site manager.

Operations Server & Systems

• Check recent outages and messages to the community on the Systems Status site.
• Check the status of all servers on the Big Brother site.
• Check Operations Metrics of server and application "up" times, "outages" and view the graph of average up and down times.
• In an effort to learn from our experiences, we are building a database of failures we have had, and how we can best avoid them in the future. You can log into the Lessons Learned database to learn more.
• Failure: Disaster Recovery plan in the event of and Operations server or system failure.
• Operations Production File Servers, and DFS Resources
• Operations Escalation Flow Chart- Normal Business Hours
• Operations Escalation Flow Chart- Off Shift Hours

Decision Making:

• Identify our threshold for an outage: When is our next deadline?
• Decide whether to repair the server or failover to disaster recovery procedures based upon:
  • the estimated time to repair the server that is down, versus
  • the estimated time it will take to accomplish the failover if all goes well.

Communications:

• If you need to send a voice mail message to a pre-defined group, see the Telecom instructions.
• If you need to set up a conference call, see the Telecom instructions.
• If you need to send an email message to a group, see the Communications site. Here are the templates commonly used for:
  • Bernie (Oracle Financials, Resumix, Kronos)
  • Meg (Data Warehouse)
• University Data Center Communication Procedures
• If you need to contact one of our main vendors, their numbers can be found here.
• Calling Cards are set up for emergency conference calls to be held. Please see the List of Participants to identify what number to call for your department. Instructions for using VSPAN.
• Quick Guide / Telephone Trees

Finance and Administration, our largest client, has prepared disaster recovery plans for the several systems.

Payroll, our most critical of systems, has a formal Disaster Recovery Plan that includes information on how to recover from system failures of the timekeeping system, Kronos, and the paycheck printing system, Formscape. Should the systems not be repairable in time to meet the payroll schedule, then we have an agreement with Ceridian to have the payroll run off campus. Should a large disaster strike New Haven, our out of state data storage agreement and server rotation schedule would come into play.

General Accounting, which includes several subsystems, has disaster recovery plans that assess the risk and set forth recovery strategies.

In all cases, the management, application, and emergency contacts are documented.

Facilities, has prepared an overview of its disaster recovery strategy, given a small, medium, or large disaster. Between service level agreements, server redundancy, tape back ups and out of state storage and server rotation schedule, we believe the data is protected.