Scheduled maintenance of information technology resources is critical to the overall health and security of the University computing environment. However, IT is cognizant of the effects of maintenance on UCA’s teaching and learning environment. Accordingly, a schedule has been created to help all University community members understand how and when systems may be affected by IT maintenance. A schedule of all planned maintenance may be found by visiting uca.edu/it/maintenance-calendar. The different types (categories) of maintenance and an explanation of notifications and exceptions is below.

Categories of Maintenance

Workstation Maintenance

Automated maintenance that affects the individual computers on campus including faculty and staff workstations, lab computers, and classroom computers. During this time, workstations may be restarted to apply system/security and policy updates.

• Daily 10:00pm to 5:00am
• Workstation Restarts 3:00am to 5:00am

Minor Maintenance

Most systems are expected to be up during these periods. Maintenance (including server restarts) may be performed when the impact is localized to a single system and/or a small portion of campus and is expected to last for a short time period.

• Tuesdays and Fridays 6:00pm to 12:00am

Critical Maintenance

Maintenance requiring interruptions to service on a broad scale will be conducted during these time periods (i.e. outages of Internet/network, Banner, myUCA, etc.)

• Wednesdays 12:00am to 6:00am
• Saturdays 12:00am to 6am and Saturdays 10:00pm to Sundays 1:00pm

Emergency Maintenance

IT makes every effort to maintain the integrity and reliability of central campus systems.  However, sometimes the unforeseen happens. In these instances, IT may perform emergency maintenance. This includes unplanned and/or unannounced maintenance that may result in downtime on campus systems and services. Types of events that require emergency maintenance include, but are not limited to:

• Zero-day vulnerabilities to which UCA may be exposed that create an unacceptable amount of risk to the security of UCA’s data or network resources
• Sudden failures of hardware
• Natural disasters
• Man-made disasters

Exceptions

Although every effort is made to ensure that maintenance occurs only during the scheduled time frames and avoids potential conflicts with the academic and administrative operations of the University, there are circumstances that arise that can force deviations from the schedule. These exceptions include:

• Emergency corrective maintenance (Emergency Maintenance)
• Major upgrades, updates, changes, and/or patches that take longer than the scheduled window
• Scheduling conflicts with vendor support personnel whose participation is required for hosted or vendor managed systems

Campus Notification of Maintenance

A schedule of all planned maintenance is maintained by IT at uca.edu/it/maintenance-calendar. For any non-critical maintenance requiring an outage of services, every effort will be made to notify the campus a minimum of five business days in advance (10 business days for major maintenance) explaining the impact and time frame of the maintenance. IT will utilize the following notification methods:

• Briefings at the Executive Staff meetings (weekly)
• Digital messaging displays in Burdick Hall
• Email alert from the Information Technology (it@uca.edu) email account
• Login messages on various applications such as myUCA, Blackboard, Banner, etc.