Technology/Desktop and Information Security

Disaster Recovery

Technology/Desktop and Information Security: HIPAA Information Disaster Recovery Critical Patches Best Practices Security Awareness Information Security

Disaster recovery is defined as: Planning to ensure the continuation of technical information processing services and operations in the event of a catastrophic event.

Although the Medical School Central IT Services never expect unplanned outages we do prepare for them. In order to ensure the availability of our systems and services our disaster recovery planning includes identifying the actions to be taken, resources required, and procedures to be followed to recover the business critical technology infrastructure and business services from the effects of an unexpected event.

Specifically this planning includes:
-24 X 7 monitoring of all networks and servers.
-Offsite data backup
-Redundancy of Systems.


Because the nature of unplanned outages can greatly vary, planning for three levels of Disaster Recovery have been implemented:

1. Tier 1 - Local disasters: Computer room flood, fire, power failure, or hardware failure which might render specific segments of the network inoperable or certain resources unavailable.

2. Tier 2 - Campus Wide Disasters: In the event a large subset or the entire WUSM network was inoperable or unavailable.

3. Tier 3 - Regional disasters: In the event of a natural disaster or terrorist acts that would impact the world beyond WUSM.