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Service Continuity Management for EnterprisesDedicated Plans and ITAR-Support Plans Service Description
Published: October 2012
Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
ContentsIntroduction......................................................................................................4
Document Scope.................................................................................................................4
Service Continuity Overview...............................................................................5Service Recovery Terms......................................................................................................5
Incident Classification........................................................................................6
Catastrophic Outage Response...........................................................................7
Annual Exercise Program...................................................................................8Exercise Rescheduling.........................................................................................................9
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
IntroductionService continuity management focuses on the ability to restore Microsoft® Office 365 services to customers in a predetermined timeframe during a catastrophic service outage. Achieving restored services requires preparation, planning, technical implementation, and exercises to validate the incident management and service restoration solution and processes.
Document ScopeThis document describes the common approach to service continuity management that Microsoft provides for customers subscribed to Office 365 for enterprises dedicated plans and for customers subscribed to Office 365 for enterprises plans that support the security, privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements for U.S. federal government agencies requiring Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and commercial entities subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). * The information presented here applies to the following services:
Microsoft Exchange Online Microsoft SharePoint® Online Microsoft Lync™ Online
In addition, this document defines Microsoft and customer responsibilities that relate to service continuity management for the purpose of compliance and auditing. This includes:
Service continuity provisions Incident classification Catastrophic outage response Managed annual exercise program
* Services provided under Office 365 dedicated plans and ITAR-support plans are delivered from a Microsoft hosting environment where each customer has their own dedicated data center hardware.
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
Service Continuity OverviewMicrosoft Office 365 service offerings are delivered by highly resilient systems that help to ensure high levels of service. Services are hosted in Microsoft enterprise-level data centers that utilize the same world-class operational practices as the Microsoft corporate line-of-business applications. Office 365 solutions also take advantage of the extensive experience that Microsoft has in hosting services—and its close ties to the Microsoft product groups and support services—to create a service that meets the high standards that customers demand. To help maintain high service levels, service continuity provisions are built in to the Microsoft Office 365 system design. These provisions enable Office 365 services to recover quickly from unexpected events such as hardware or application failure, data corruption, or other incidents that affect users. The service continuity provisions described in this document specifically apply to when a catastrophic event occurs, such as a natural disaster or fire within a Microsoft data center that renders the entire data center inoperable.
Service Recovery TermsThe following terms are commonly used in service continuity management to evaluate disaster recovery solutions:
Recovery time objective (RTO). This term refers to the acceptable amount of time the service can be down before being brought back online
Recovery point objective (RPO). This term refers to the acceptable amount of data loss at the conclusion of the data recovery process.
Failover. This term refers to relocation of an overloaded or failed resource—such as a server, a disk drive, a network, or a data center—to its redundant, or backup, component.
The RTO and RPO parameters for Office 365 dedicated plans are provided in Table 1.Table 1. Microsoft Office 365 Dedicated Plans RTO and RPO Parameters
Microsoft Office 365 Service RTO RPOExchange Online 2 hours or less 45 minutes or lessSharePoint Online 4 hours or less 2 hours or lessLync Online 2 hours or less 45 minutes or less
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
Incident ClassificationAn Office 365 service outage may be due to hardware or software failure in the Microsoft data center, a faulty network connection between the customer and Microsoft, or a major data center challenge such as fire, flood, or regional catastrophe. Most service outage incidents can be addressed using Microsoft technology and process solutions, and are resolved within a short period. However, some incidents are more serious and have the potential for lengthy outages. Microsoft uses the Service Interruption Scale that is shown in Figure 1, which classifies outage incidents as minor, critical, and catastrophic events based on their impact to customers.
Figure 1: Service interruption scale
To learn about how Microsoft manages incidents that impact availability of Office 365 services, see the Microsoft Office 365 Support for Enterprises Service Description document.
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
Catastrophic Outage ResponseMicrosoft analyzes each outage that impacts Office 365 service availability to determine the scope of the incident and possible solutions. Outages that cause customer work stoppage may be considered catastrophic outages. In the event of a catastrophic outage, the Microsoft incident management team sends the initial outage notification to the customer via email unless the email service for the customer is not functional; in that case, a phone call is made to an agreed-on customer telephone number. Status updates are provided to the customer every hour or as appropriate for the particular incident. In addition, a Microsoft CritSit Manager helps ensure that outage notifications are received by customer executive contacts. The customer provides the most current contact information for these executives to the Microsoft Service Delivery Manager (SDM) assigned to the customer. Initial contact with the executive contacts is made by phone within 60 minutes of the outage being declared. Additional follow-up frequency will be set and agreed upon by the executive contact.An outage may be declared a disaster if it is classified as a catastrophic event based on the Service Interruption Scale (Figure 1). Declaration of a disaster does not automatically result in failover to the customer’s redundant secondary data center site. The decision to failover to the secondary data center is made by mutual agreement between Microsoft and the customer except in cases of “force majeure” when Microsoft will proceed with the failover and inform the customer as quickly as possible after addressing the disaster. Figure 2 illustrates the end-to-end Microsoft response to a catastrophic service outage.
Figure 2. Microsoft response to a catastrophic service outage
Customer Responsibilities Provide contact information. Provide a single email group alias and phone
number so that Microsoft can engage appropriate personnel at the time of an event to review the current status of the outage, disaster declaration criteria, and approval or disapproval of failing over to the secondary site.
Provide declaration support. Provide executive-level declaration authority contacts to the Microsoft declaration authority to help determine if failover to the customer secondary site is necessary.
Microsoft Responsibilities Provide contact information. Provide a single email group alias and phone
number so that the customer can engage appropriate personnel at the time of an event to review current status of the outage, disaster declaration criteria, and approval or disapproval of failing over to the secondary site.
Decide whether failover is required. Make the decision, with input from the customer, on whether to fail over to the customer secondary site.
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
Annual Exercise ProgramAt a customer’s request, Microsoft facilitates a service continuity exercise—a best practice that is advocated by business continuity specialists. The purpose of the service continuity exercise—or what is commonly called a failover exercise—is to validate the incident management and service restoration solution and processes and to provide Microsoft and customer management with all documentation regarding the results of the exercise. Microsoft provides for a maximum of one failover exercise for each contract year. The first exercise cannot be scheduled until after the purchased Office 365 services are fully deployed, and subsequent exercises must be at least 12 months apart. A typical service continuity failover exercise will:
Simulate a catastrophic outage, and validate incident management processes and disaster declaration criteria and processes.
Execute failover to the secondary data center as appropriate for each service. Impact a small number of customer-selected user mailboxes, BlackBerry user
accounts, and/or SharePoint site collections.In addition to conducting failover exercises, Microsoft offers a table-top exercise. A typical table-top exercise will:
Enable participants—either in person or online via a Lync meeting—to review documented plan activities in a stress-free environment.
Effectively validate team roles and responsibilities during an emergency. Identify needs for training, documentation errors, missing information, and
inconsistencies across business continuity plans for both Microsoft and the customer.Microsoft recommends that customers consider conducting a table-top exercise prior to their first failover exercise. This initial table-top exercise can be conducted prior to completion of deployment and prepare customer teams for their first full failover exercise after service deployment is complete. The three phases of a failover exercise—Preparation, Validation, and Resolution—are shown in Figure 3
Figure 3: Failover exercise phases
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Service Continuity Management Service Description (Dedicated Plans) | October 2012
Customer Responsibilities Provide a project manager to work with the Microsoft Office 365 service continuity
project manager during the exercise planning, execution, and post-exercise phases. Participate in the pre-exercise, exercise, and post-exercise phases. Schedule at least one service continuity exercise. Microsoft recommends conducting
the initial exercise within 10 working days after the customer migration to Microsoft Office 365 services is complete.
Submit a written request to the SDM to schedule an exercise at least 90 days prior to the proposed exercise date. The request should identify a first and second choice for dates and timeframe, and define the service or services to be validated during the exercise.
Provide written cancellation notice within 30 days of the scheduled exercise if the exercise is no longer required.
Microsoft Responsibilities Provide an Office 365 service continuity project manager to work with the customer-
provided project manager during the exercise planning, execution and post-exercise phases.
Participate in the pre-exercise, exercise, and post-exercise phases. Respond in writing to the customer’s request for an exercise within 10 business days,
with confirmation on resource availability and projected start date. Review the service continuity management exercise calendar to ensure that
customer migration and provisioning are completed prior to scheduling an exercise, and to ensure that the requested exercise date does not conflict with other migration, deployment, upgrade, or maintenance work being managed by Microsoft teams.
Determine the availability of the resources necessary for the exercise. Document exercise results via an executive summary and then work with the
customer and Microsoft teams to close any issues encountered during the exercise.
Exercise ReschedulingAll scheduled exercises will be subject to immediate cancellation or termination if Microsoft or other Office 365 customers declare a disaster and request use of the resources that have been designated for the exercise. Exercises may also be postponed if there are active catastrophic (Severity 1) or critical (Severity A) issues in the customer environment 24 hours prior to the exercise.In the event an exercise is cancelled, reasonable effort will be made to reschedule it.
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