An application is only useful to its users if it is available. We therefore have extensive
policies, procedures, and automated systems in place to ensure that the PPO application
remains available to users. |
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| Physical infrastructure |
The first link in the availability chain is to ensure that the physical infrastructure that supports the application remains available. The data centre in which the PPO servers are hosted ensures this availability with the following measures in place:
- Physical security measures as previously described;
- Resilient and redundant network infrastructure with a 1 GBit connection to the internet;
- Climate control;
- Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) including standby generators;
- Fire detection and Argon-Nitrogen fire suppression;
- 24 hour monitoring and on-site technicians;
- Replacement of any faulty hardware within 1 hour; and
- Hardware based RAID (disk redundancy).
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| Monitoring and response |
The PPO application is continuously monitored from an off-site location using a
specialised service provider. If the PPO application does not respond within 3 minutes
automatic SMS‘s and e-mails are sent to multiple support staff who then kick off a
response plan based on a set escalation procedure. |
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| Client communications |
If the PPO application becomes unavailable (whether for scheduled or unscheduled
downtime), support staff update our Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/ppo) to
ensure that users are aware of the outage and are kept abreast of the latest
developments. If the outage lasts for longer than 30 minutes (during business hours),
additional e-mail based communications will be sent out depending on the nature of the
incident. |
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| Mirroring |
Mirror copies of all client data are maintained on specialised mirror servers which are updated every hour. Each application server has both an on-site mirror (same data centre, different server) as well as an off-site mirror (different data centre, different server). All client data in encrypted while in transit. |
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| Backups |
In addition to the mirroring process described above, historical, snapshots are also maintained for additional redundancy. |
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| Fail-over and disaster recovery |
In the event of a loss of a server or data centre, whether as a result of hardware failure, power failure or communication failure, we have a comprehensive fail-over process in place.
We make extensive use of pre-configured virtual servers, which allows us to provision a new PPO application server within minutes in any one of our data centres. In conjunction with the mirror process previously described, this allows us to move any or all clients to an alternate server, data centre or hosting country within a very short period of time.
This process is continuously tested as part of disaster recovery preparedness but is also used routinely when upgrading our hardware or doing load distribution. |
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| PPO Technical Fact Sheet |
| The technical fact sheet provides a high-level overview of the architecture of PPO including the logical and technical architecture as well as the hardware & software requirements to run PPO. The fact sheet also deals with security and availability, as well as integration and interoperability. This fact sheet has been published in Adobe Acrobat (PDF). |  | PDF (ADOBE DOCUMENT)
0.79 MB |
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