All computing and network services require an ongoing strategy of maintenance and upgrades. Each individual service will vary on frequency and scope of such activity. This documents an overall approach.
Always-on services
Critical IT infrastructure is designed to be resilient and redundant such that an individual server can fail or be purposely taken out of service and the overall service is still available to the user community.
Regular maintenance and upgrades will be undertaken on these services to keep them current with respect to patches and features. These changes will be accomplished in a manner that does not result in a planned service outage.
Services in this category include:
- Infoblox DNS and DHCP service
- Nexus Active Directory service
- Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) web service
- mailservices
- Exchange Server, connect
Highly available services
Another set of services are broadly used by the campus community, but are not yet highly resilient and redundant.
IST will not plan maintenance and upgrades for this set of services during normal university working hours (Monday - Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.).
Services in this category include:
- CAS authentication service
- SharePoint sites
- Learn
- JobMine
- Emergency response
- Telephones
The Jira Service Management system is used to report problems to, or request services from, various groups within IST, and some other departments/faculties.