When we think of disaster, we tend to think of fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and now terrorism. But an event does not need to be large-scale or catastrophic to qualify as a disaster. Human error, malicious behavior, and even the complexity of the systems themselves can bring about high-impact outages that affect your service levels and business operations. In order to build a resilient communications network that can survive any type of disaster, organizations must create a contingency plan that considers the people, hardware, operating and escalation plans, and, ultimately, the money to put it all together and keep it running.

Developing an Uptime Plan
Developing an uptime management plan provides organizations with a structured way to assess critical processes and threats, and to build a program of detection, notification, restoration, and recovery to implement when a disaster or major disruption occurs. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has produced a Contingency Planning Guide for Information Technology Systems which is an invaluable resource to help any organization with this goal. It outlines a seven-step approach:

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