Stages of Responsiveness

In general, the state of operations for an enterprise can be defined in color-coded stages:

• Green: IT operations are running smoothly. Any reported problems are being handled by the help desk according to the predetermined triage policy.
• Red: The organization is in full disaster recovery mode. Mission-critical systems are down, and damage control is in effect.

And then there is the yellow area in between where the problem and the outcome are uncertain – when the local weather station is warning of the possibility of a hurricane, or when the systems manager is indicating an unconfirmed security breach. Sometimes there is no way to tell how things are going to turn out. It may be unclear as to why such an event is happening, or how far things could go, but it is important to be ready for the next step.