This content:
- Effective: February 2010 and replaces all previous releases.
- Applies-to: All services operated, maintained, and supported by Scush Inc.
Contacts
- Customers may submit requests by email or phone to your Account Executive or by email to info@scush.com.
Hours
- “All Hours” are 24/7/365.
- “Service Hours” are 8 am to 8 pm Eastern Time, 365 days/year.
- “Business Hours” are 8 am to 5 pm Eastern Time, Monday to Friday, excluding statutory Federal and Provincial holidays.
Incoming Requests
- All requests, whether by email, phone, fax, or other means, become tickets in our support management system.
- Auditing details are recorded on all activities and all tickets are managed per the following policies and procedures.
Ticket Categories
- Assistance request (including Sales)
- Change request
- Issue report
Issue Ticket Priorities
- Urgent
- A critical failure affecting service availability or data integrity.
- High
- A critical or repeating issue affecting multiple customers but not affecting service availability.
- Medium
- An issue occurring under rare and non-critical circumstances and not affecting service availability.
- Low
- A minor or cosmetic issue not affecting service availability.
Issue Ticket Responses & Escalations
- Urgent tickets are managed during All Hours by our Network Operations Centre engineers.
- Non-Urgent tickets are managed during Business Hours, in order of priority and category.
- All non-Urgent requests receive a reply within a maximum of two normal business days and normally within one business day.
- Account Executives may internally forward ticket updates and escalations during All Hours.
Change Management
New features, enhancements, and change requests come from a variety of sources; such as, customer feedback, sales requests, focus group studies, internal resources, and industry trends. Every new request is processed through the following procedures.
Note: To help ensure service high-availability and performance, no changes of any size are permitted to any aspect of our production environments except during Production Implementation.
Note: For a new, non-critical enhancement to qualify for inclusion in a scheduled release, the request or order must be mutually approved prior to the applicable service's next release date by a minimum of 30 days plus the request's estimated delivery time. (ie: A request with a 30 day delivery estimate must be fully approved by customer and Scush at least 60 days prior to desired release date. Additional lead time may also be required as will be indicated prior to approvals.)
- Initial Communication
- Preliminary request definition and scope evaluation with customer consultation(s), as applicable.
- Benefit, risk, and cost assessments.
- Project steps are determined and approval(s) secured, as applicable.
- Research, Engineering, and Development
- Further reviews, scope refinements, and in-process approval(s).
- Standards compliance management.
- Version control management.
- Change documentation management.
- Quality Assurance
- Internal sandbox testing, change refinement, and service documentation management.
- Major new features and enhancements may be tested in sandbox by select parties, as applicable.
- Implementation verification test plan is refreshed.
- Advance Implementation Notification
- Major new features, enhancements, and education requirements are planned with customers in advance of implementation, as applicable.
- Non-Urgent changes are scheduled outside Service Hours and posted to Homepage Messages, in advance.
- Customers have the opportunity to advise of any unusual schedule conflicts and request rescheduling.
- Production Implementation
- Entire environment and data are backed-up for roll-back availability and for archival.
- Urgent issues are resolved during All Hours and a notice of any offline time is posted to Homepage Messages.
- Implementation is executed.
- Verification test plan is executed.
- Successful implementation proceeds to post-implementation.
- Any new issues that can be resolved and re-verified are executed.
- If a priority issue occurs that cannot be resolved within implementation window, entire environment is rolled-back, pre-implementation environment is verified, and process returns to engineering for investigation.
- Entire environment and data are backed-up for archival.
- Post-Implementation
- Production environment returns to lockdown status.
- Pre and post implementation back-ups are forwarded for secure archival.
- Summaries of changes are posted to Release Notes.
- Important news, change notices, and helpful tips are posted to Homepage Messages.
- All implemented change tickets are transferred to the production control process for ongoing operations, maintenance, and support.
Service Environments
Our service environments all participate in the most advanced physical and electronic security applicable. Each environment is backed-up nightly and archived to bank vault weekly, as applicable. Our environments feature SSL encryption of online access, as applicable, and redundant internal encryption of identity data, as applicable. Finally, we actively maintain disaster recovery plans for each environment. The environments we typically maintain per each service include the following.
- Production
- This is the live service maintained in our Network Operations Centre during All Hours.
- Development
- This is the research and engineering environment used for new development and support, physically isolated from live production.
- Production Sandbox
- This is an account-based production version used for demonstrations and training.
- Development Sandbox
- This is an isolated development version used for Quality Assurance (see Change Management).
Network Operations Centre (NOC)
Our production environments operate in one of the largest, state-of-the-art, secure NOCs located in a geologically, meteorologically, and politically stable region in Canada. Services include monitoring and support during All Hours, fault-tolerant hardware, redundant power generation, redundant internet backbones, and more with a 99.99% uptime. Our NOC also features the latest in green technologies, having up to 1/20th the carbon footprint of typical data centres.