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What is the Anatomy of an Outage?

By Zac Blankenship / Tuesday, 2 March 2021

Many organizations, when a service outage of a mission-critical application happens, the priority is to restore business services as soon as possible. Most don’t even think about the process that leads to full recovery. Many organizations have root cause analysis processes but this is only one part of a much bigger process. In practice, there are many things to go into restoring full application services that are either overlooked or are just second nature to many. We will briefly talk about what is the Anatomy of an Outage.

When you look at a continuity event closely….end to end, there is a complex set of moving parts that take organizations through the lifecycle of restoration business services. In some organizations, there is a degree of automation that provides guidance through this process. However, in the vast majority, this is manual or performed adhoc. So what are the key components of an outage of a mission-critical application? What does each accomplish? How does this tie together into the use of technologies like Continuity Engine?

Anatomy of an Outage

  • Awareness
  • Resolution
  • Failover
  • Recovery

These four aspects of the anatomy require an understanding of how all these fit into your business continuity plan. This is essential to having reasonable expectations on recoverability. For example when you understand what you're doing manually (maybe unconsciously), it makes it easier to figure out where to apply automation to fill in gaps and reduce the overall time to recovery (RTO), and increase the quality of the recovery. This changes how you look at continuity solutions on the market. The measuring stick is much longer knowing that whatever is chosen can address in some degree all four of these anatomy components.

Neverfail will publish for the next five weeks explanations of each phase of the Anatomy of an Outage. We encourage you to read all the short eLessons that will come from this series. At the end of the eLearning series, organizations will have access to the full eBook entitled “Anatomy of an Outage”.

For more information on how Neverfail can add awareness to your continuity strategy, please reach out to the Neverfail Sales Team at sales@neverfail.com or call us direct at US Sales: +1 (888) 988-8647 and UK Sales: +44 (0870) 777-1500.

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