About Mission Continuity

This program is designed to ensure that the University can recover its mission critical functions, meet its fiduciary responsibilities, and comply with federal and state requirements for the health and safety of the environment as well as all students, faculty and staff during and/or after any disruptive event. The program focuses on the three key elements of recovery: human resource continuity, work area recovery, and resumption of information technology/utility services.

The office uses a two-tiered methodology to achieve its goals. First, we ensure that individual departments have continuity plans in place, and second, we ensure that University-wide critical functions, such as Energy Services and Finance, are adequately prepared to successfully weather any disaster. We have developed templates, based on industry standard best practices, to identify essential functions and resources needed to meet these goals.

Upon adequate development of plans, the Mission Continuity Office also regularly updates and tests University mission continuity and disaster recovery plans to ensure on-going efficacy. Plan elements may include crisis management, recovery management, employee communications, alternate site requirements, site-specific checklists and more.

The office also maintains a database of the documents and procedures the University and its employees will follow to respond to any type of mission disruption. Disruptions may be a power outage or an event that affects a single floor in a building, an entire building, a city-wide disruption, or even a regional disruption. Items affecting mission continuity range from loss of power, to floods, terrorist attacks, or anything that causes loss or interruption of business functions.