• assessment of the situation: Software, hardware, and facilities based
• contact of personnel: Internal, external, and client
• review of existing corrective action plan
• deployment of corrective action plan resources
• monitoring of corrective action plan
• ongoing feedback from key areas of interest
• modification to plan as dictated by new threat/risk potentials
• stair step of processes (human/technical) to steady state operations

Backups of the application and application data are made on a daily basis. Transaction log backups are created every four hours, and a differential backup is created on a nightly basis. In the rare case of an issue at a server level, a new server is made available from stock, and the base server configuration is installed. At that point, image backups of the original configuration are applied and tested. In the case of a database server, backups are restored and rolled forward to the last available transaction log backup.

Full system backups are performed on Sunday evenings. Differential backups are performed Monday through Saturday evenings. Transactional backups are performed every four hours.

System load is monitored on an ongoing basis to determine the point of lowest load. This data is used to determine the best time for the backups to be performed. The system is available for use during each of these backup periods.

Application interruptions occur at a frequency of less than .03 percent. To date, application interruptions have never resulted in a loss of data outside of the current data transaction. As each application transaction is wrapped from a database perspective, the potential for data loss is limited to the transaction level. The system architecture uses a clustered solution for fail-over purposes.

Acceptable performance is achieved by ensuring that the system hardware and software may be scaled both vertically and horizontally. Vertical scaling involves the creation of hardware-based clusters to maximize performance. Horizontal scaling allows various segments of the application architecture to be assigned to specific servers within the clustered environment.

Application load is balanced using a combination of network load balancing and Microsoft Cluster services. The technology for back-end clustering is designed for managing high availability of data. And, network load balancing, in the front end, helps ensure high availability of front-end services. While network load balancing scales out across a set of hosts, the back end – cluster service – provides high availability and fail-over for the database.

Operitel uses extensive monitoring and logging to ensure that the appropriate personnel are notified preemptively when a situation could arise. If such a situation does arise the logging allows for extensive research and for the development of a correction plan that would then be implemented.