<P> One of the biggest causes of downtime is misconfiguration, where a planned change goes wrong . Typically organisations rely on manual effort to manage the process of configuration backups, but this requires highly skilled engineers with the time to manage the process across a multi-vendor network . Automation tools are available to manage backups, but there are very few solutions that handle configuration recovery which is needed to minimize the overall impact of the outage . </P> <P> A planned outage is the result of a planned activity by the system owner and / or by a service provider . These outages, often scheduled during the maintenance window, can be used to perform tasks including the following: </P> <Ul> <Li> Deferred maintenance, e.g., a deferred hardware repair or a deferred restart to clean up a garbled memory </Li> <Li> Diagnostics to isolate a detected fault </Li> <Li> Hardware fault repair </Li> <Li> Fixing an error or omission in a configuration database or omission in a recent configuration database change </Li> <Li> Fixing an error in application database or an error in a recent application database change </Li> <Li> Software patching / software updates to fix a software fault . </Li> </Ul> <Li> Deferred maintenance, e.g., a deferred hardware repair or a deferred restart to clean up a garbled memory </Li>

Which would be considered an example of system disruption