Developing Procedures Based on Policy to Respond to Incidents

If your hosted site were to go dark suddenly, what would your response be? Do you have a policy that dictates such events?

Your policy in this case would be to take whatever action you deem appropriate for a multi-hour outage. This may be something as follows:

1. 1. Determine if we are dark (out of service)

2. 2. Determine the root cause of failure (power outage at D/C)

3. 3. Determine what the ETTF (estimated time to fix, none at hour "X") is

4. 4. Determine whether the ETTF is within your set standard (1 hour, 2 hours, and so on)

5. 5. Activate recovery plan if the ETTF is beyond standard

Your procedures are just that: They are yours. If you can withstand a 24-hour outage without a problem, then that is something. Remember, the response is driven by an event such as an outage, but your policy is the overriding factor.

The best method to determine your policy is to devise a chart of events that could lead to outages.

Here are a few events to think about...