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hosting environment

BCL offers a choice of the most flexible hosting packages on the market. Whichever option you choose, you’re guaranteed your own dedicated instance of BC which is ring fenced from other instances allowing you to benefit from:

• The ability to upgrade to the latest versions of BC at times that suit you and your projects.
• A white labelled product:
  • that can be hosted on a domain of your choice,
  • with an interface carrying your company and/or project branding.
• Integrated with your company's systems such as:
  • MS Exchange,
  • database applications, such as a HR database, accounting system and others.
• The ability to add and create applications (using BC toolkits) on your server without affecting others.
• Full Admin access to your server and projects.
• Ownership of the audit trail created on the server.

Hosting Options

We can provide either:

1. Fully Managed Hosting Package - giving clients all the benefits of an ASP service and more.

• BCL source, purchase and own the hardware that your BC servers reside on:
  1. We use HP Dual Core servers ensuring we provide our customers with the most reliable and well performing servers on the market.
  2. Hardware based firewalls.
• Storage environment:
  1. We use Net App SAN storage facilities. All data is replicated to a site that BCL occupy, ensuring that your data is readily accessible, should a disaster occur at the prime hosting site.
• Internet connectivity to the server:
  1. BCL provide unmetered access to your BC server, with redundant connections.
• Options for:
  1. Co-shared servers (default) – your instance is installed on a platform with other instances, each of which are completely ring fenced and easily transferable should you out-grow the server.
  2. Dedicated server – option of dual core DL 385 or DL 585. Such flexibility allows you to invest in the technology that is most appropriate for your projects.

Approximately 80% of our clients choose the Fully Managed Package on Co-shared servers. The decision is often straightforward particularly when given the reassurance that should they wish to transfer to a dedicated server or a self hosted server, this can be facilitated with minimal disruption to projects.

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2. Self Hosted Option – BCL is able to offer clients a self-hosted environment. Clients that choose this route do so based on some of the following considerations:

• The number of internal users far outweighs the number of external users. Meaning that the server can sit on the organisations’ WAN and benefit from potentially faster access to the servers.
• Their Projects require them and them alone to have full control and access to the server.
• Tight integration with their servers, e.g. financial systems, if required.
• A hosting environment for other applications already exist and placing the BC server in such an environment provides costs savings.
• The BC service is for the purpose of an Internal Document Management and/or dynamic Intranet only, requiring tighter integration with corporate systems.

Some clients opt for both a fully managed environment and a self hosted system. Such an option is suitable where the customer would like the comfort of a fully managed server that will be used by their clients, suppliers and partners and an internal server which is used for internal document management, internal collaboration and as the basis of their Intranet.

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Security and Availability of Service

1. Prevention of unauthorised access

• Access to the BC server itself is controlled by UserID / password authentication.
• Issue of new UserIDs and passwords, and the revoking of redundant UserIDs, is controlled by the clients’ Systems Administrators.
• For systems containing highly sensitive materials, it is also possible to control access using SecureID token hardware.
• Once a user has accessed the server there are comprehensive internal access controls to ensure that any individual only has access to the parts of the system to which they are entitled. This can be applied at individual document level.
• Our hosting provider, Mistral, provides Datacentres with strict security infrastructure allowing only authorised personnel to have access to the buildings.

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2. Availability
Our fully managed hosting service has been designed to be available on a 24/7 basis with Service Level Agreements available. This is achieved by a combination of the following:

• Pro-active monitoring of resources including monitoring of network and IP services
• Network configured to have availability of 100%
• Hardware ‘Fix on Fail’ service
• Server configurations include redundancy, for example duplicate power supplies

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3. Backups
Backups are managed by state-of-the-art Net App SAN technology.

A mirror of the customer’s data is held at locations occupied by BCL and/or CODA PLC, protecting our clients from the unlikely event of a major disaster at the hosting center or an insolvency event involving the hosting provider or a vital part of their supply chain.

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4. Disaster Recovery
We take every precaution to guarantee your data is available to you as soon as possible in the unlikely event of a disaster.

• Clients have the option to enter into an Escrow Agreement providing access to the latest BC source code in the unlikely event that BCL ceases trading
• In addition to the above, BCL is a member of the NCCTP (Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers). The NCCTP members have developed an import/export mechanism, such that if one of the members goes into liquidation, its’ clients data can be imported into another NCCTP members system in order to ensure business/project continuity

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