Availability of ICS facilities
ICS provides a wide range of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) facilities and services for students and staff. Many of these services are critical to the University's business of learning, teaching, and research.
All of our facilities and services are designed and planned to be as robust and resilient as possible within our funding.
Other than scheduled disruption for essential maintenance and development work, we aim to provide services that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Occasional equipment failures are an inherent risk given the complexity of the University's ICT provision, but our automated recovery mechanisms minimise disruption so the majority of failures are not noticed by service users.
Our core service provision hours are 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday. During these times there will normally be full first and second line (specialist) support for all systems.
The ICT systems used by the University are highly complex, interlinked, and themselves dependent on other services such as the electricity supply. As with any other area, serious problems can sometimes arise which are difficult to prevent and recover from.
Services are normally left running unattended overnight, at weekends, and during University closure. However, there are only informal on-call arrangements for IT support staff and no 24 hour external support contracts are in place at present. This means that recovery from a serious failure may not get underway until the start of core service hours.
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