Notice of Planned Outages – February 24, 2024
On Saturday, February 24 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.
You should not be affected if you are already logged in to these services, this should only affect new logins during this maintenance time:
- MyLearningSpace
- Active Directory for authentication
- Laurier Single Sign-on (SSO) enabled applications (e.g., Microsoft 365)
- Laurier websites (wlu.ca, students.wlu.ca, give.wlu.ca)
- Banner
- LORIS
- OneCard
- Navigator
- Computer labs
- VPN
- Cognos
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.
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.