This maintenance policy describes how we handle maintenance and the communication policies we use to notify you of potential service disruptions due to maintenance and updates. Our goal is to minimize disruption while maintaining a reliable and secure service.
Maintenance window
Maintenance updates are almost always applied "hot" so your use of Spectrum OnDemand services won’t be impeded. There may be a small period of time when parts of the service use different versions of software or data, but this will not affect your use of the services. In rare circumstances, a hot update is not possible, so the service will be taken down during the maintenance window.
As outlined in your Service Level Agreement, the maintenance window for the Spectrum OnDemand production environment is from 6 AM to 10 AM on Sundays, Eastern Time for the Americas region, UK time for the Europe region and Sydney time for the APAC region. We will give you at least one week's notice if there will be downtime during the maintenance window.
Staging environments are not covered by our Service Level Agreement, so there may be downtime for maintenance in staging environments at any time without notice. We may include staging maintenance timelines when giving advanced notice for production maintenance.
Notification policies
We want each notification you receive to be meaningful and significant. If we were to send you notice of every update we make, you would receive notices several times a month. We have developed these notification policies to help ensure that you receive communications relevant to you while avoiding sending communications of little value.
We strive to target communications only to those customers impacted by the update.
We only provide advance notice of updates in these situations:
- We are making a change that will cause more than a minimal impact on your use of Spectrum OnDemand. In this situation, we give you some advanced notice so you can test the updates using the staging environment before we apply the update to production.
- We are adding new functionality that you need to resolve a business issue.
- You are using a service that we are removing.
If an update impacts only a few customers, your Spectrum OnDemand Account Manager will notify you by email or phone. If the change impacts a large number of customers, the Spectrum OnDemand Product Manager will send an email communication to all customers. For this reason it is important that you notify your Spectrum OnDemand Account Manager if your contact information changes.
Testing updates in the staging environment
We provide advanced notice to give you an opportunity to test changes in staging before we deploy them to production. We recommend that you take advantage of this opportunity, although we do not require it.
Updates in staging are moved to into production on the announced timeline. In rare cases, an update that we apply to staging with the intent to eventually apply it to production will not be applied to production. Examples of such cases include:
- We discover that the update is not reasonably fit for its purpose
- We discover that the update does not support customers who have followed the requirements documented in Requirements Checklist (unless it is a major update with an extended notification period)