After a number of incidents within a short timeframe.

• Based on outdated, unsupported software,
• Developers have left the organisation and documentation is minimal,
• Running on unsupported hardware with outdated and unsupported operating system.

Syllabus+ INC0615093 - Lack of data to support timetabling.  

Syllabus+ experiences issues dealing with the amount of data change that takes place at the start of each academic year.  This year, these issues caused an MI.

The software is very old and requires an update or to be replaced. The business are writing a Business Case for this work to happen.

Until upgraded or replaced.

If the option to upgrade is chosen, the software needs to demonstrate it can deal with the amount of data change that takes place at the start of an academic year.

Radioactive Substances Interactive Database - RSID 

and 

Lasers Inventory Database VIRGIL

There is no vendor support for these applications

Both are essential for legislative compliance and security. Although currently stable there is no contingency if there is a failure.  They also contain personal information of staff who'd undertaken training to use Lasers and Radioactive material.

Both are hosted on RSID01HV.

Until replaced by a system with vendor support, or a new vendor takes on support of the application.

6840 Distribution Layer Switches

There is an EMEA wide shortage of Cisco 6840 switches.  These have been prone to failure during power events.  Distribution layer switches must work as a pair of identical hardware switches, therefore any failures would require both switches to be replaced with alternative hardware causing disruption.  Cisco 6840 switch operating as a Distribution layer pair are placed into Heightened Awareness for any change relating to power work impacting the building hosting the switch. 

Until Supply issues are resolved, or the 6840 Distribution Layer Switches are all replaced with hardware in general supply

After an MI, it is usual for a technology to be placed in to heightened awareness for a minimum of 6 weeks.  This period can be longer if it is felt that certain actions need to take place before faith is restored in the technology.

The period of heightened awareness is implemented for several reasons.

1. We have just recovered from a service outage.  IT need to ensure that we aren't responsible for causing more outages which impact the businesses ability to function and deliver.
2. There needs to be a period of stability on the configuration.  We need to ensure that changes being made are to reduce the risk of a repeat MI.  If several changes are made and the system crashed, it will be more difficult to understand if this is an MI caused by the same root cause, or by newly introduced configuration.

Where a technology has not experienced an MI, but there are concerns about the support / stability of the technology, it may be placed in heightened awareness as a precaution.  For example,

• Where a key system was developed in house and the people who understand how to manage and maintain it have left the University.
• Where the hardware solution has left warranty and replacement parts are known to be difficult to source.
• Where the software solution has left vendor support, meaning issues the University can't solve can not be referred to the vendor

A technology might be placed in heightened awareness due to risks introduced by other technologies that support it.  For example, if the backup solution that backed up a number of servers failed, those servers would be in heightened awareness.  While the servers themselves continue to work as expected, until the backup solution is up and running the servers would not be able to restored.

Where there is a known bug in a technology which means it is at increased risk of failing and causing a service outage, a technology may be placed into heightened awareness.  The technology would stay in heightened awareness until the risk from the known bug was removed or reduced sufficiently.  This might be by patching software, changing configuration to reduce the bug being triggered or putting measure in place to automatically recover should the bug occur.

The AC01 pair have now been decommissioned.

The vendor has provided details of how testing has been changed so that any future issues with edited content would be detected prior to release.

The system has now been stable for 6 weeks post the below high priority incident.

INC0601430 - Users experiencing problems with playing back edited lecture capture recordings on MediaSite

The AC03 pair have been upgraded to a version of software that has a fix for the bug that caused the MI (INC0575080.)

Since the upgrade there has been one month of stability.

16/06/2023