Disaster

1. A sudden, unplanned calamitous event causing great damage or loss. Any event that creates an inability on an enterprise's part to provide critical business functions for some predetermined period of time. Similar terms are business interruption, outage and catastrophe. 2. The period when enterprise management decides to divert from normal production responses and exercises its disaster recovery plan (DRP). It typically signifies the beginning of a move from a primary location to an alternate location.