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Midrange Hosting
Service Description
Category:
Application Services
BCCS provides midrange hosting services to the many State agencies of Illinois. This service includes a variety of underlying support services such as midrange application server and development environments, systems integration, the underlying network and communications infrastructure, systems management, security, backup and recovery.
Our midrange hosting environment utilizes a variety of technologies tailored to meet the needs of our customers and can support everything from single database systems utilizing traditional thick client interfaces to complex midrange database systems accessed via a web browser and involving automated business-to-business data transfers.
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What is Included?
Every application hosted on the midrange environment by BCCS includes these services:
- Network Services (LAN/WAN)
- System Administration
- CMS Service Desk
- Application Recovery options
In addition, professional PC workstations are available for purchase that can support the work of customer application developers.
There are four basic areas common to every application hosted on the midrange environment with standard methods and software available to BCCS customers. The basic components of applications hosted on the midrange environment include:
- Application Input can be accomplished by direct keyboard input, file transfer, imaging or on-line forms processing.
- Application Output includes the various methods utilized to print, report, and transfer processed data for practical use.
- Processing represents the internal operations and platforms allowing for the collection, organization, calculations and resulting output from the application.
- Backup, Storage and Recovery is essential to the protection and recovery of data captured as well as the ability to recover from system failure.
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What Should You Expect?
- Service availability requirements must be identified. Availability is an engineered component of initial application planning. Current systems may be promoted to higher levels of availability as a new project initiative. Service availability options extend to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, subject to and limited by the business requirements defined within governance planning, and, resource and budget constraints.
- An environment that's secure and robust
- System administration, configuration and tuning
- Pre-planned software and system upgrades, following documented processes for Change Management
- Administration and maintenance of production security software
- Backup and recovery schedules and planning assistance
- 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday break/fix technical support is standard with an optional 24/7/365 service desk limited by on-call technician availability.
- Technical systems Disaster Recovery options
- LDAP administration and management
- Tracking of service rates and invoicing
- Prompt, friendly and courteous technical support staff collaborating with customer application development staff in their efforts
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How Can You Help?
- Identify disaster recovery (DR) strategies which incorporate business continuity using best practices in order to provide DR solutions which can mitigate the risk of exposures and reduce costs to the agencies
- Test recovery of application data.
- Develop and monitor application data backup schedules.
- Ensure efficient application development best practices to reduce costs
- Engage CMS early in the application planning stages
- Develop long-term evolution projections during the initial application planning
- Assist CMS with long-term capacity planning - maintaining good communications with BCCS concerning application initiatives and agency business planning
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Rates
FY2013 SSRF Rate Structure (PDF, 17KB)
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Service Order Information
Unlike other services that begin with an Enterprise Service Request, midrange application hosting and new application development initiatives need to be coordinated with the BCCS midrange management team. Contact and involve the BCCS midrange management team early in your application planning to ensure timely accommodation of your midrange hosting needs.
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Need More Information?
The first point of contact or inquiry concerning any new midrange application hosting initiative, or, a planned update to an existing midrange application is the BCCS midrange management team.
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