Simon Resilience & Availability


Simon uses the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region on AWS.  See this page for more information on Amazon's Regions and Availability Zones


All backups are stored inside the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region of AWS.


Our database instances (RDS) have been configured with automatic backups daily and daily backups are retained for the past 7 days.  Backups are completed using industry standard tools facilitated by our hosting provide (Amazon Web Services).


Simon is hosted on Amazon's EC2 service which guarantees a Monthly Uptime Percentage of at least 99.95% for Amazon EC2 servers within the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.


We also use Amazon S3 to store customer data with 99.99% availability.


How does Simon manage Maintenance, Outages and Incidents?


Scheduled Maintenance Periods


  • Production upgrade releases are scheduled out of business hours and we try to keep downtime to a minimum.
  • We communicate new releases to our customers when we know the release details. We also share the new feature user guides for our
    customers to access on this support portal.
  • An 8-hour outage window occurs every week on Thursday at 8pm (AEST) to provide regular system maintenance.
  • An administrator of a customer's account can request for others in their organisation to be added to our release notes and outage distribution list. We notify this distribution list of upcoming scheduled outages, any incidents that may affect their platform and features release notifications.



Unplanned Outages

  • Simon runs redundant infrastructure to ensure high availability and scalable services.
  • In the case of any outages our incident management processes will be enacted as detailed below.


Incident Management

     For any incidents, a structured process is used to address and resolve the incident.  

     Our process for handling incidents are:
  • Employees who are made aware of the Incident notify management
  • The time and date incident is discovered is recorded 
  • If known, the cause, extend and context of the incident is recorded 
  • If the incident relates to a data breach, the Data Breach Response Plan is enacted
  • Customers are notified of the incident and associated impacts
  • Our development team is involved to contain, rectify and remedy the incident
  • If required a emergency maintain outage will be scheduled to deploy required resolutions
  • Customers are notified when the incident has been resolved

BCP arrangements of Simon hosted service


Simon is hosted in Australia using an Australian Availability Zone server located in Sydney. While BCP events are important for any organisation, at Simon we handle the management of BCP events in the following ways:

 

  1. In the unlikely event that our Australian Availability Zone becomes unavailable we are able to set up and migrate our EC2 server to a secondary Australian Availability Zone within minutes
  2. Using our nightly back up of data , if required, we are able to roll-back a backup into our production instance if a catastrophic failure in the primary Availability Zone were to occur.

Our support service levels


Our support team is dedicated to resolving any issues quickly and efficiently. If you experience an issue that requires our attention you can log the issue via a support ticket at thinksimon.com.au/help or alternatively contact us at (07) 3910 3775 during business hours.

When you log a ticket with us, we will triage your issue into an incident or a service request.  Where the issue is categorised as an incident we follow our standard incident management processes outlined above.  Where your issue is not an incident we aim to response to your issue and resolve it within the following timeframes.

Priority 1 - Response within 1 hour and resolution within 4 hours.
Priority 2 - Response within 4 hours and resolution within 12 hours.
Priority 3 - Response within 8 hours and resolution within 3 days.
Priority 4 - Response within 1 day and resolution within 5 days.

To help you understand how we prioritise your service request here are some of the guidelines we follow when categorising your issues.

  • Failure of the platform that results in downtime is generally considered a Priority 1.
  • Errors in the platforms (that don't compromise data) or where individual end users are unable to log in are generally considered Priority 2
  • Support to assist with system configuration and content within your Simon instances is considered a Priority 3.
  • Non urgent customisations that you request are considered Priority 4.