Network and Computer System Availability
- Adam Dinnes
- Twyla Rivalee Barkakoty (Unlicensed)
Information Technology must perform routine operating system maintenance, apply critical security patches and update equipment regularly to ensure that Beloit College's information is secure and that the computing technology is reliable. As technology use becomes more essential to all college operations, finding times to perform these tasks with minimal impact is difficult. Our practice is to try to minimize the impact of maintenance, but occasionally vendor support is required. Not all vendors are available 24x7x365, and often support contracts that provide that availability are prohibitively expensive.
As a result, IT created a schedule defining our committed service availability and scheduled downtimes. Explanations of the three categories — Committed Uptime, Expected Uptime and Scheduled Downtime — are below the schedule
| Committed Uptime IT makes every effort to ensure that the network and all systems are up and running during this window of time. Emergencies may occur, including network and system outages that are beyond the College’s control, but IT’s goal is to provide better than 99% uptime during these times. |
| Expected Uptime The network and all systems will normally be operational and available during this window. However, if IT needs to do unplanned maintenance work that could cause the network or systems to be unavailable, that work will happen during these times. |
 | Scheduled Downtime The Beloit community should plan on systems often being unavailable during this window. IT will make best efforts to perform most routine maintenance and system changes or upgrades during this time. |
Twice per year extended maintenance day
With the majority of maintenance windows moved outside of business hours, IT should only need to interrupt committed uptime hours once or twice per year. We will try to minimize the impact to the Beloit community by scheduling an extended maintenance day on a Saturday only during Winter Break and July 4th week. Ample notice of the exact date will be provided to the campus community.