Restoring Service after an Unplanned IT Outage

An unplanned outage is the unexpected failure of a computer or network hardware system or software application in a business. The combination of hardware, software, network components, and people required to operate a corporate computer or network production environment increases both the environment's complexity and the probability that unplanned outages will occur. Unplanned outages commonly fall into one or a combination of seven categories: acts of nature, hardware, human error by someone inside a company, human error by someone outside a company, software, system overload, and vandalism. This study aims to develop and validate a research tool to give insight into the approaches that incident managers use to restore service. Such a tool is absent in the literature despite its value, given companies' increasing dependence on their IT and network systems.