About our Development Process.

We have a three stage development process.

Development is carried out on our developer’s computers and which replicate the software on our servers and the Oracle Database Schemas. Changes are then uploaded to the test servers and only after testing uploaded to our live servers.

About our Servers.

After development of new software, or changes to existing software the new code is uploaded to our “test servers”. There our testers ensure the software works and the objectives in the specification have been met.

These test machines exactly mirror our “live servers” both in terms of hardware, and the software system environment within each server, so, we can immediately test whether the changes have any bad effect on other software already running on the machines. If anything goes amiss it can be sorted at once without causing any outage of our customer’s applications on the “live servers”.

Also, as the servers need to be re-booted after every change of software, nobody notices the effect of this work being done on the test servers.

Like the test servers, the live servers are in pairs of “Application Server” and “Database Server”. This is to ensure optimum performance in terms of speed. Changes to the servers are almost always made when the UK sleeps so that the reboot does not affect any of our customer’s sites, most of whose users are also in the UK.

About Resilience

In 2004 a hurricane hit Fort Lauderdale where our servers were housed at the time in a very upmarket data centre. It was the second hurricane we had cause to be aware of there. The first one knocked out “multiple” power sources to the data centre for about an hour. The second one knocked out the power to southern Florida for days.

We couldn’t even contact the data centre, there were no phones working, and neither of two firms of detectives we hired could reach it for a lack of fuel. The effect was so catastrophic that the locals could not drive, they had no fuel for their cars, and they had no fuel to run generators… which they needed to get that fuel out of the ground.

We decided to do two things, first move the servers out of Florida, secondly, set up our servers in two Data Centres in completely different geographic locations.

Since then our Live Servers are based in Boston. Our Test Servers, (which are also our back up servers), are based in Charlotte. Data is backed up from Boston to Charlotte every night and if, (pray it never happens), a terrorist took out the power supplies in Boston, we would be back up serving pages from Charlotte within minutes.

About Data Security

Security is always a primary consideration and all data is completely secure. The buildings which contain the servers built like bank vaults and only authorised personnel have access to the server floors. Out of our staff only two individuals can access our live servers, Steve McInnes our database administrator, and Denis Astafyev, (or Den as he is known universally), our server administrator.

Our only two really sensitive data applications are the Business Crime Database and the Parents’ Evening Booking system. In both these cases data is encrypted when it is passed between a user’s computer and the servers. On the servers themselves Steve has organised that the data is encrypted again and again and again. As a test SBCC, (The Scottish Business Crime Centre), employed “Ethical Hackers” to try and breach our security, and they totally failed.