Table of Contents

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• <Announcing the new Business Critical Application registration service>, includes a helpful table for comparing the service levels.

Terminology

• Application – examples include Banner, Star, Laulima, gMail, Kuali Build, etc.
• BCA – Business Critical Application
• Business Critical – vital to the University's ability to perform its mission.
• Directory Services – an IAM service for listing people and related information about each person. LDAP is the primary software component of this service.
• IAM – Identity and Access Management, an ITS team dedicated to authentication, authorization, directory, and related middleware services.
• ITS – Information Technology Service, a system office.
• Production environment – AKA Production. Production supports the University's daily business operations. All changes to Production are first vetted in Test to mitigate the risk of interruption to University business processes.
• Service level objectives –AKA SLO. For a business critical application, the application should be available at least 99.5% of the time. There are a number of requirements that need to be in place in order for this objective to be met and sustained.
• Stakeholders – the executive sponsor and primary contacts for a business critical application.
• Temporary Production environment – a deprecated Production environment that is retained temporarily for applications that cannot initially work with the updated production environment. For example, we may maintain a deprecated UH Login environment supporting TLS v1.0 for a limited time if you are unable to correct your application before the test window ends and TLS v1.0 is retired in production.
• Test environment – AKA Test. Changes are first introduced to Test so that everyone has the opportunity to test for any breaking changes.
• TLS – used to secure Internet communications between your application and UH Login. The TLS version changes every few years as stronger cryptographic ciphers are required to ensure secure communications. Your application will periodically need to be tested to ensure that it works with the newer TLS versions as older ones are retired.
• UH Login – an IAM service for authentication. Identifies the person attempting to access your application. CAS and Shibboleth IdP are the primary software components of this service. 

Requirements

An application is business critical if, besides being critical to your daily operations, it is provided with the proper support staff and the proper maintenance activities are regularly performed. Each of the following is a prerequisite requirement for declaring an application to be business critical. A team that cannot meet all of these requirements puts a business critical application at a high level of risk.

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IAM Test environment references:

• UH Login, CAS – <developer documentation>
• UH Login, Shibboleth Identity Provider – <developer documentation>

Terms and Conditions

The following help to manage expectations:

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You can remain informed by subscribing to the UH App Developers list. All planned changes and calls for testing are announced to the UH App Developers list. This forum is for the UH IT community, which includes IT staff, IT managers, IT professors and those participating in IT-related projects. More information is available <here>.