ICT Disaster Recovery Day

Dates of forthcoming ICT Disaster Recovery Days:

The next Disaster Day will take place on Thursday 5th January 2012.

The 2012 tests will be more rigorous than last year’s and as a result there will be significant unavailability of IT and library services throughout the whole day. This includes web, blackboard, email, library catalogue and the telephone service. It is anticipated that testing will start at 9am and be completed by 5pm and we will inform all users when the tests have been completed.

Saturday 7th January.
In order to minimise disruption to users, we will be testing disaster recovery procedures on BIS systems (AStRA, QL, Cyborg, etc) on Saturday 7th January instead of on Thursday 5th January.  Access to BIS systems will still be affected for some periods on the morning of Thursday 5th while the network is recovered, but it should be possible to use these systems without interruption from midday onwards on that day.  These systems will not be available to users on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th January.

What is the Information Services ICT Disaster Recovery Day?

It is important to test the readiness of Information Services staff to cope if a disaster occurred which interrupted our IT services. So, once a year, we put our planning to the test and deliberately simulate a disastrous outage. 

In order to minimize the impact on our users, we always carry out this test just after the Christmas closedown when there are fewer active users than at other times of the year. We recommend that you plan your work accordingly, as there will be significant disruption to our computer and communication  services on these days.

For further information, please see Assistant Director Tim Davies's presentation for the Computer Science department via the link below:

http://abercast.aber.ac.uk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer/Default.aspx?id=82e33c6b-1411-475a-b38f-241dfe8f0043