Announcing the new Business Critical Application registration service
Business Critical Applications
ITS manages a number of Business Critical Applications, such as Banner, STAR, Laulima, KFS, and PeopleSoft HR. Updates to UH Logon (CAS/Shibboleth) and Directory Services (LDAP) require careful coordination in order to ensure that there are no interruptions in service. In the past these updates were relatively infrequent. That will be changing in the months ahead.
If you would like to register your application as business critical, and your application meets the requirements, this new service helps ensure that the team managing your application can likewise engage and coordinate with ITS. Please review the following resource for more information.
Definitions
Application – examples include Banner, Star, Laulima, gMail, Kuali Build, etc.
BCA – Business Critical Application, applications that are essential for the daily operations of the University.
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.
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.
Even if your application is not business critical, it still is important!
Updates to UH Logon, Directory and other IAM services are announced to the UH developer community at the same time they are announced to the registered Business Critical Applications (BCA) teams. The following table outlines the differences between the standard service and the new BCA service.
Service Features Comparison Table
Service Feature | Standard | Community registered BCA | ITS managed BCA |
|---|---|---|---|
Early announcement | y | y | y |
General reminder announcements | y | y | y |
Test environment access | y | y | y |
Temporary Production environment access | y | y | y |
UH App Developer community membership | y | y | y |
Registered team contacts | y | y | |
Team contacts followup | y | y | |
Executive escalation | y | y | |
Annual renewal requirement | y |
Service Feature Descriptions
Early announcement – the Test environment will be updated for testing purposes. Once updated announcements are sent to both the registered BCA contacts and the UH App Developer community.
General reminder announcements – as the the Test period winds down reminder emails will be sent to the registered BCA contacts and the UH App Developer community.
Test environment access – the Test environment is available to the entire community, including 3rd-party integrations. It is highly recommended that each application team maintains a separate test environment for each application to expedite testing.
Temporary Production environment access – in the event that an application is unable to successfully complete testing and remediation (if needed) in time, a temporary, deprecated Production environment is available to buy a little more time. The application will have to be reconfigured to reference it, and its longevity is limited.
Annual renewal requirement – teams managing a registered BCA will need to annually renew their registration and update contact information as needed.
Registered team contacts – teams managing a registered BCA will need to provide and maintain contact information in order to ensure successful communications between the team contacts and ITS.
Team contacts followup – to supplement the general reminder announcements sent to the UH App Developer community, ITS will directly contact the team contacts as needed to ensure that testing is proceeding in a timely manner.
Executive escalation – in the event that an application cannot be corrected to work with the planned Production changes in time, and the temporary Production environment has reached the end of its life, executive management will be consulted to help ensure that the most appropriate business decision is determined.