The primary support areas include but are not limited to:

• Proactively manage storage, processing capacity, software licenses and other capacities.
• Ensuring resource capacity is correct for the current and projected levels of resource usage.
• Ensuring capacity is sized appropriately to meet current and future business requirements
• Collection of detailed information concerning resource usage levels.
• Developing responses to both short-term and long-term events.
• Developing plans to address new capacity requirements.
• Developing and updating alert thresholds as needed.
• Providing clients with on-going recommendations on capacity changes, including potential capacity shortfalls.

Avocette's Change Management includes the management of all changes respecting or relating to any application from the submission of a change request by the client through to implementation of the change.

• Avocette will perform an initial review of the change request and provide the client with a change approval document before implementing the change.
• Software patches and maintenance releases which are activities associated with implementing patches or updates to an application supporting the environment(s) or database(s) to maintain the application currency and supportability, address security or other vulnerabilities, and ensure compatibility with changes in the operating environment.
• The management of the additional complexities of grouping multiple changes into a release and deploying those changes into the Production environment.

Disaster recovery and business continuity services include activities associated with planning and preparing for a disaster that may threaten the continued operation of a clients' applications and business critical computing environments. They also include activities to respond to a disaster or emergency, should one occur.

Disaster recovery and business continuity services include the following:

DRP Creation

Avocette will assess which applications and services are business critical and work with clients to develop create Disaster Recovery Processes where none exist.  

DRP Testing

Avocette will perform annual Disaster Recovery Process testing if required to ensure the backup and recovery procedures are working correctly.

Testing Services include activities associated with finding defects within applications as well as verifying whether applications operate as expected. Some of the testing services offered by Avocette include:

Test Planning and Preparation

Test planning and preparation includes reviewing requirements and design specifications to qualify and quantify the types of testing required.

Test Data Management

Identifying and creating new test data, both transactional and referential in order to complete the testing of these new functions.

Product Testing

Product testing consists of a variety of tests that validate the changes and that the application meets the functional, non-functional and technical requirements.

Functional Testing

Functional testing is a component of product testing that bases its test cases on the design specifications of the application under test.

System Testing

System testing should focus on any target requirements that can be traced directly to use cases (or business functions), and business rules.

Security Testing

Application security testing focuses on three (3) key areas of Application security:

Integration/End-to-End Testing

Integration testing is the phase in software testing in which application components and other related applications (upstream/downstream transactions) are integrated, combined and tested as a group

Performance Testing

Performance testing is a broad category of tests that are used to validate and verify the performance related Application requirements and architecture design components.

Load Testing

Load testing measures subject the Application-under-test to varying workloads to evaluate the Application’s ability to continue to function properly under these different workloads.

Volume Testing

Volume Testing subjects the Application-under-test to large amounts of data to determine the limits at which the software will fail. 

Regression Testing

Regression testing is any type of application testing that seeks to uncover new errors, or regressions, in existing functionality after changes have been made to an Application, such as functional Enhancements, patches or configuration changes.

Test and Defect Reporting

Test and defect reporting is a sub-set of application project delivery status reporting that involves the active monitoring and measurement of testing related key performance indicators. 

To ensure that applications are fully supported, Avocette provides Transition Services which include both the transitioning-in and transitioning-out of applications.  Avocette will perform Transition Services that provide efficient and effective transition-in and transition-out processes to ensure that risks are properly managed and the desired outcomes for Transition Services are met.

Transition-In Services

Transition-In Services will involve Avocette acquiring all knowledge, access, materials and any additional information required to enable Avocette to successfully provide all AMS Services to the client.

Transition-Out Services

Transition-Out Services will be provided near the end of a contract and will involve Avocette providing the client with all knowledge, access, materials and any additional information required to maintain services and applications.