Head in the clouds: outsourcing your IT infrastructure

An increasing number of Siveco customers chose to outsource the hosting of their solutions, instead of investing in their own servers and hiring the IT resources required to maintain them. This is true not only of smaller companies without a strong IT department, but also of larger corporations with very well-established in-house IT team.

A few years ago, hosting was already a hot topic, but it was seldom implemented in practice: fears related to data security, system and data ownership, and so on, were prevalent. Since 2012, feelings towards hosting appear to have changed significantly. Nowadays few customers even question security and ownership issues, these are considered a given in the internet world, where everyone already relies in one way or another on servers located somewhere, anywhere, in the clouds.

This new trend corresponds to an increasing market share for our bluebee^® cloud solutions, designed to be hosted anywhere, including on our own servers. Our first customers all wanted to host the system on their own servers, which often resulted in high costs and subpar reliability… The truth is that the IT aspects of a project, easily discounted when everything runs smoothly, present major headaches when things go wrong… The Siveco support team recalls countless examples of disastrous disk crashes, inexplicable network slowdowns, irrecoverable backup (“we did not know we were supposed to do back-up”). Troubleshooting such problems usually involve collaboration between several parties – hardware suppliers, IT suppliers, Siveco, internal IT department, end-users etc. In practice few customers can manage this process efficiently.

Nowadays most customers welcome a hosted or cloud-based approach. This article provides an overview of Siveco China’s offering for hosting and technical support services, with a focus on the complete cloud offering.

Of course, Siveco doesn’t own or operate its own data centers. Instead, we rely on the infrastructure of giant partners such as Aliyun (AliCloud), a subsidiary of Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, providing large-scale distributed computing systems to the industry.

Aliyun cloud servers feature self-service management, data security, advanced features such as automatic recovery and preventing network attacks. They are designed to help streamline development and deployment process, reducing operation and maintenance costs, build on-demand extension of site structure, so as to adapt to the fast-changing Internet application features. As such, they are particularly well-adapted to bluebee^® cloud users.

Servers are located in mainland China, which is ideal for access within China, but less optimized for access outside of China due to the current limitations in China’s international internet Infrastructure. The cloud servers are optimized for bluebee^® cloud in a multisite and mobile users environment.

For smaller customers, typically Coswin CMMS users, we may work directly with the China Telecom or China Unicom data centers, providing dedicated servers that one of our IT subcontractors manages, under our overall responsibility. In all case, the Siveco support team remains the customer only point of contact.

Siveco provides full operation services for customers’ Mission-Critical Servers (i.e. our servers run systems supporting our customer’s daily operation).

All activities related to ensuring the reliable operation of the cloud servers are undertaken by Siveco, which includes the maintenance of the server in terms of:

• Server hardware, internet connection (server-side), operating system, database and application server
• Monitoring
• Backup

The Siveco applications – bluebee^® cloud, bluebee^® and Coswin – themselves (bug fixes, upgrades, users support) are maintained under the Siveco Enhanced Support Contract, which also covers utilization audits.

This approach is totally transparent to end-users, who will simply use an internet-based system. No IT support is required from customers, with the exception of ensuring that end-users computers and mobile devices have correct access to the internet. No administrative access to the server will be given to the client, as none is needed.

All support calls to Siveco, for all Siveco contracts, will be conducted through the unique Siveco contact point, i.e. the Siveco China national hotline (free number) 4006-300-213 and email support@sivecochina.com, as well as direct error reporting from Siveco applications (a feature of bluebee^®).

• 24/7 automated monitoring of server
• 24/7 emergency hotline, with 60-min call-back
• 24/7 service for server recovery and other server-related emergencies
• For non-server issues (typically users request), the conditions of the main Siveco support contract apply in terms of service hours and response times

In the absence of major natural disasters or other acts of God, a 99.9% server availability is guaranteed for cloud servers (for non-cloud servers running Coswin, specific availability targets can be defined). In case of hardware failure, the system is automatically migrated to different physical servers while retaining the same IP address, ensuring minimal downtime and users’ impact.

The use of large-scale distributed computing systems, with multiple copies of data, ensures that damage can be recovered quickly. Data backups are performed daily and 7 days of backups are retained in a separate physical location.

The firewall is designed to prevent ARP attacks, MAC spoofing, to provide effective protection against DDoS attacks, to scan for port intrusion, Trojan horses and other vulnerabilities. The latest anti-virus technologies are implemented on all servers.

The data center benefits from multi-line connections to both China Telecom and China Unicom networks, ensuring high-speed for users throughout the country. Dedicated bandwidth effectively solves the bandwidth bottleneck, unlike traditional bandwidth sharing.

For cloud servers, server configuration can be changed elastically, directly online by Siveco personnel, to adapt to future capacity needs (data storage, sites and users). Such extension is done without system downtime. (For non-cloud servers running Coswin, specific migration procedures with planned downtime may be inevitable.)

All system data remains the exclusive property of customers and can be exported at any time, in Excel format using bluebee^® cloud built-in functionality or, upon request to Siveco, in Excel or MySQL database format (no fee applies for this service). In addition, the application software itself can be migrated to other servers (other hosting company or in-house data center) if customers wish to (installation fees apply).

All Siveco solutions can be hosted, with limitations as shown in the table below.

*Note: with or without bluebee^® mobile users

Tags： bluebee、bluebee cloud、AliCloud、IT infrastructure、cloud computing