The ITS Outage Process is a standard process for planned, unplanned, and unannounced outages for Information Technology Services and is intended to minimize the impact of service outages.

This process applies to all outages, and any change with a risk of an outage, to production services and network infrastructure, components, and capacity for which ITS is accountable. Service changes may also be announced using this process. Please refer to the ITS Maintenance Window guidelines if your service does not have a SLA or equivalent.

• A Planned Outage is when a planned change causes an interruption in client or internal facing production services with any amount of downtime. A planned outage is when planning and scheduling of the outage occurs in advance.

• An Unplanned Outage is an interruption in client or internal facing production services that wasn't planned in advance. 
  • ITS Unplanned Outage Escalation Process - a process for escalating communication and teamwork during an unplanned outage. When things go from bad to worse.
  • ITS Division Operation Center (ITS DOC) - is an emergency management team pulled together to manage extreme situations that can’t be handled in normal operations.

• An Unannounced Outage is when a planned or unplanned outage occurs and this ITS Outage Process is not followed.

The full Outage Process document (PDF) is available here.

Questions?

• Contact Marian Sherrin regarding the Outage Process.
• Contact Lisa Bono regarding communication.