Application and Infrastructure services

The Facility Management service includes the complete management of hardware, software and connections necessary to the use of Sofia. A dedicated data center allows you to use Sofia via internet in conditions of maximum physical, logical and application security.

Each user can access Sofia remotely, with prior authorization, from a PC connected to the internet. The Facility Management service includes the selection, sizing, provision and installation of the hardware.

Within this service, Sofia Online is in charge of the maintenance and update of the Sofia software and the relative hardware platforms. Sofia Online also provides technical and application support in order to guarantee to the Customer that Sofia is always available via the following processes:

Management and monitoring of the technological platform
Verification of the status of the infrastructure used by Sofia in order to guarantee availability

Systems’ maintenance and updating
The updating of hardware, basic software, networks, and infrastructure

Management of user access security
Creation and management of the user access to the platform and the assigning of rights to shared resources

Management of requests relating to the technological platform
Increase in storage, need for new application environments, activation of systems engineering projects, connection to external suppliers for the receiving/sending of flows, or the upgrading of hardware

Sofia is installed in a highly reliable environment, a safe and innovative solution. The server farms offer the following:

• Secure environment with guaranteed access to authorized personnel only
• Redundant power supply and the availability of emergency generators
• Redundant networking infrastructure, both internally and externally, on internet backbone
• IDS (intrusion detection system) and network monitoring systems
• Monitoring of systems and infrastructure 24/7
• Site infrastructure in place in the event of a natural disaster (earthquakes/floods)

The production data center is located in Settimo Milanese (near Milan), at the BT Italia site, a structure with a TIER IV classification. The Disaster Recovery site is located in Pomezia (near Rome).

The Server Farms are certified with ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001 and OHSAS 18001.

The AM services can be provided either in conjunction with the Facility Management, or in the case in which the technological infrastructure supporting Sofia is based on Customer premises. In this second case the services shall be provided via an indirect permanent connection via Internet between the offices of Sofia Online and the servers on which Sofia is installed.

Sofia Online guarantees application support activities in terms of overall system performance monitoring, the uploading of releases and patches, and the monitoring of specific Sofia modules or processes such as the scheduler and the strategic interfaces to which the Customer wish to dedicate a continuous monitoring.

The Service includes the complete management of the uploading process of new Sofia releases, the monitoring of Sofia performance, and supporting the systems maintenance of the technological platform. The main characteristics of this service are:

• Continuous system monitoring and supervision aimed at achieving and maintaining satisfactory response times of Sofia
• Monitoring system performance for both the part attributable to the hardware platform on which Sofia is installed, and to that attributable to response times of a set of system’s key functions
• Diagnosis of any performance issues and the sharing of these issues with the Customer
• Management of the upgrade process of Sofia including the upload of releases in both the pre-production and production environments, as well as any corrective patches, according to the shared communication protocols
• Management of the analysis process of the impact of new Windows patches which the Customer intends to upload on Sofia servers

The Service can be enriched with optimization and re-engineering of Sofia sources activities in response to possible bottlenecks that may arise in relation to the specific operating realities of each Customer.

Through the Application Management Scheduler service, Sofia Online regulates the correct execution of all the macros that the Customer has requested using Sofia module, that allows the programming of the timing and frequency of macro execution.

Sofia Online provides the following:

• Scheduling the macros indicated by the Customer at the desired time and frequency
• Monitoring the smooth running of the scheduled macros and the availability of the Scheduler
• Updating the list of email addresses that will receive notification emails for each macro
• Resolving application problems, re-launching the macro and monitoring the relative outcome
• Sending of notification emails containing the outcomes of the scheduled macros

With the Order Routing monitoring service, Sofia Online guarantees the smooth running of Sofia in relation to the connectivity with the systems managing the orders exported from Sofia Orders Register module, and to the subsequent reception of the executed to Sofia, by facilitating/supporting the timely resolution of any order routing problems that may arise.

The V&T service is custom designed and aims to help the Customer simplify, document, prepare and execute the most complex part of the testing process of new versions of Sofia or customizations that are the object of the service, with the objective of mitigating the risks associated with a constantly evolving system. The V&T service provides for the execution of tests directly on the Customer's systems and data, using shared workflows. The service is based on the know-how of SimCorp Italiana and Sofia Online on the system and on the processes they support at the Customer, as well as on a proven methodology of testing and incident management.