Monitoring

There is no such thing as a perfect software or unbreakable system. Errors happen, software fails, systems go down usually due to a very unlikely combination of data entries that were not imaginable during testing. What we can do is to keep an eye on all the components running and prevent failures before they happen. Our engineers are pro-actively monitoring our servers, applications, services, and web sites for a wide range of indicators – from servers’ fans speed up to Web sites’ performance. When some component does not match the baseline of its normal operation, an alert is triggered, and our support team reacts to this alert, by finding the source of the potential problem and solving the problem. That way we know about the problems and prevent them before they have occurred, thus ensuring there is no downtime for the applications running on our servers.

Backup and disaster recovery

Backups are an integral part of each successfully running infrastructure. Having a good backup of your data in a secure location, you can survive and recover from almost any disaster. Using Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, we ensure that all the Tenders in the Negometrix system are backed up and can be recovered in the event of failure, data lost or other kind of disaster. Backups are stored on two separate places. The short-term protection data is stored in our collocation on fast hard drives, providing extremely fast method for recovering. The long-term protection data is written to tapes and kept offsite in a secure location, ensuring that there is a solid backup over the time.

Internet Connection and Power Supply

The internet connection and power supply for the servers are provided by our hosting partner Deutsche Telecom, the largest of its kind in Europe. The servers for our customers are connected to the Internet using redundant routes, so that in a case of failure of one route, the connection automatically start to flow through one of the other available backup routes. In the case of a power outage, there is a UPS network to support all of technical equipment. If the outage lasts longer, there are diesel power generators, which can support the load.

Security

Security has many aspects. Physical access to our server machines have only authorized personnel which first passes a check in our hosting partner before been granted access to the servers. Remote access for management, maintenance, software updates and other support activities is also granted only to our engineers. All of these activities are performed over a secured and encrypted connection. All access to our servers for support and other similar tasks is logged so that we have history of who did what and when.

Data safety in our daily practice

All customer data since 2001 is still available and operational. All tender related information is always migrated to newer versions despite the addition of many new features and modules. Negometrix guarantees such data integrity for a minimum of 5 years after closing tenders. A third party escrow arrangement is available on specific request. We consider as customer data under our guarantee:
- A specification model with weighted criteria and weighted sub criteria
- Contact and other basic information on (potential) suppliers
- Tables and graphs comparing submitted offers by suppliers
- Messages exchanged between the buyer and the (potential) suppliers
- Document uploaded
- All data entered during auction and single bid pricing