Update: ICT Disaster Recovery Exercise Postponed Until April/May 2026

Dec. 16, 2025
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UPDATED: Saturday, February 12 at 1:00pm

 

The ICT Disaster Recovery Exercise that was scheduled for Saturday, February 21 has been postponed. Due to ongoing technical issues with a third-party provider, we have made the difficult decision to cancel today’s scheduled exercise and reschedule for Spring 2026.
What this means:
  • All applications and services are up and running 
  • No intermittent outages will occur to any Laurier managed websites or applications for the remainder of the day
 
All production systems are available and functioning normally. There was no impact to any production service availability.
 
The Disaster Recovery exercise will be rescheduled for late April/early May 2026. Additional communications regarding the exact date of the future exercise will be communicated in the next coming months.

Please contact the ICT Service Desk if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you for your cooperation during this important exercise.

FAQs

What is the Disaster Recovery Exercise?

The Disaster Recovery (DR) Exercise is a test of the strategies and methods that we have developed for recovering Laurier’s information technology (IT) systems and applications required to support priority business functions, and processes and services in case there was ever an emergency that brought them down.

During the exercise systems and services are shut down and are restored in an alternative data center to test our ability to migrate services and systems should a disaster occur. We then test the services to ensure they are fully operational before the changes are reverted.

Why do we need to do it every year?

The annual testing of the Disaster Recovery Plan is to ensure that the plan is up-to-date and reflects business and system changes that happen throughout the year.

How long will services be impacted?

A 12-hour maintenance window is scheduled for the exercise. Services will be affected during this time.

How likely is real disaster that impacts IT services to take place?

There is always the possibility that something could occur, and we conduct these exercises as a risk mitigation strategy.

Why do the services need to be turned off?

During a disaster exercise, primary services are shut down as a simulation of a “disaster”, this is the only way to test that the plan works, and services can be restored from the secondary location.