Intergen recognises the importance that the Internet has in the delivery of online applications for communication and conducting business.
To achieve the required levels of availability, reliability, scalability and security a minimum set of services is required. These include:
- 7 x 24 hour monitoring and application availability
- On call engineers able to respond quickly to issues raised
- Access to a call logging service 24 hours per day
- A supplier who knows and understands service level arrangements and commitments
- Flexibility that allows for remote management of equipment on your premises
- Options for you to provide your own equipment
- A secure facility
- Highly experienced and capable staff
- Scalability options capable of catering with demand peaks and troughs
- Purpose built facilities
- Back-up and disaster recovery options
- A proven methodology and operational procedures
- Solid track record
In addition to providing these services Intergen has extensive design, development and deployment expertise through our history of developing Internet applications.
Intergen supports the following features and characteristics:
Physical Security
This addresses the placement of equipment, access to the location of the equipment and to the server(s) and other equipment. Intergen operates a "Multi-Zone" physical security model for the hosting environment.
Zone One is a restricted access computer room with swipe-card access control. Security swipe cards are carefully controlled and only issued to authorised employees. Zone One contains restricted access management terminals, internal servers and other resources requiring a moderate degree of security.
Zone Two houses Intergen's hosting environment. This is a secure computer room accessible only from within Zone One and requires an additional keypad access code. Only authorised, Intergen Technical Services staff are privy to this combination. Both environments are air-conditioned, and are secured with comprehensive professional fire detection and alarm systems. All servers and equipment are housed in braced, rack-mounted systems.
Shared Environment
Intergen operates a shared environment, supporting multiple customers and systems. Several arrangements exist to restrict or prevent shared users from accessing other sites in the same environment. Although the servers often share a common physical environment, it is not possible for end users to gain access of any sort between managed sites within this environment. Intergen permits a wide range of authorised administrative end user access to the hosted environment.
Redundancy, Failover and Contingency
Intergen's hosting environment offers high-speed internet connectivity. The hosting environment consists of server-class hardware featuring redundant disks, fans and power supplies. Appropriate spares are maintained on site. All servers and user equipment are supported by heavy-duty UPS facilities to guard against short and medium-term power outages. Access to a parallel site can be arranged to permit more extensive systems replication, fail-over and disaster recovery strategies for customers having a non-stop availability requirement.
Backup and Recovery
Intergen Technical Services staff administer the frequency and types of back up, and service levels concerning what gets backed up and when. In addition to intermediate operational back-up and transaction dump services, customer system back-ups are completed daily (full database dumps and tape back-ups). Other than the tapes required for the current rotation cycle, all media is checked for readability and is stored off-site by Online Security Services. All media on-site is stored in a fireproof safe.
Restoration
Specific service levels about system restoration are contained in individual customer agreements. However, in no case would total restoration ever exceed a total outage of greater than 12 hours from the time of notification to resumption of service.
Intruder Detection
Intergen delivers "best practice" proactive site monitoring based on specially agreed service levels. In addition to general infrastructure monitoring, and other host-based intrusion detection systems that may be in operation for a customer's site, Intergen offers true 'application level' performance monitoring that ensures your services are functioning at the business level. Intergen's Managed Services team provides a 24x7 on-call support service that is able to respond to environment alerts or to "suspicion threshold" breaches.
Experience
Our Technical Services team offers an extensive range of systems consulting and technology management skills. Specialising in Microsoft's Back-Office suite, Intergen deliver reliable administration and maintenance services, as well as specialist consulting skills across all Microsoft technologies including .NET.