Informed Solutions

The client

Informed Solutions is a leading independent provider of digital transformation, technology, data analytics and systems integration services.

Informed is working with a large government agency in the transport sector to provide the digital infrastructure for a major national GOV.UK service. The bespoke application that has been developed by Informed Solutions is a public-facing, transactional digital service, hosted on AWS.

The challenge

Informed Solutions needed a partner who could provide full stack support for the digital service outside of core hours (9:00 am – 5:30 pm, plus weekends and public holidays). They wanted a team with deep expertise who could ‘think on their feet’ in the event that an issue arose and would not just rely on following on-call procedures that could not cover every scenario. Informed understood that engaging a support partner who had proactive ‘eyes on’ the service outside of core hours would provide reassurance to both themselves and the end client.

As a high-profile government service, it was imperative that the support partner could adhere to the strict SLA and standards required by the end client.

The solution

Just After Midnight partners with Informed Solutions to provide full-stack out-of-hours support for the digital service. As an AWS Advanced Partner, we have a global team of experts who are able to quickly diagnose any issues with the complex hosting infrastructure. Our application engineers are also highly experienced with custom web applications.

The service began with a deep dive into the web applications and hosting infrastructure, including the details of stakeholders engaged in the service and the APIs used for systems integration.  Incident management runbooks and maintenance handbooks were created, access to relevant systems was granted and a support desk was set up with a dedicated phone number, support email and service monitoring.

Once support went live, to ensure that we were able to provide the best level of service to the client, our team worked closely with Informed to test and execute the business continuity plan and associated runbooks:

• We ran sessions with Informed to confirm the business continuity scenarios they wanted to test, then set up additional monitoring on pre-production environments to be able to safely test the process without impacting the live environment and user experience
• Informed solutions would then simulate the business continuity scenario on the pre-production environments.
• The JAM Incident Management team and engineers would then run through the pre-agreed runbooks as if the scenario were a real incident, investigating the root cause, testing user journeys and writing up an incident report
• Afterwards, our team collaborated with Informed to review how the exercise went, offering feedback on anything that could be improved

This process reassured Informed and the end client that our incident management process would be watertight, should any incidents with the service occur during support hours.

Results

• Informed Solutions is happy with the results of the business continuity test, and another test focused on a range of other scenarios has been planned in the near future
• The response time was less than 4 minutes