Notice of Planned Outages – February 25, 2023 

On Saturday, February 25 between 7:30 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., ICT will be conducting a disaster recovery exercise to help prepare and protect Laurier's IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.  

During this time, there will be intermittent outages to the following critical services: 

• MyLearningSpace 
• Active Directory for authentication 
• Laurier Single Sign-on (SSO) enabled applications  
• Laurier websites (wlu.ca, students.wlu.ca, give.wlu.ca)
• Emergency Notification System (ENS) 
• Banner 
• LORIS 
• OneCard 
• Navigator
• Computer labs
• VPN

The following services are not expected to be impacted:

• Wired network access
• Wi-Fi access
• Door access
• Computers and AV equipment in classrooms
• Email access off-campus

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

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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 a DR 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 intermittently affected during this time.  

How likely is it that a real IT disaster occurs? 

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

Why do 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.