ATTACHMENT 3
Vendor-Hosted Solution Questions
WMS Vendor-Hosted (Cloud Provider) Solution Questions
If a vendor-hosted option is being offered, provide a detailed response to the items listed below regarding the hosting environment for the proposed solution.
Maintenance:
- Describe the maintenance included and how it differs from a NDUS hosted solution?
- How are the system’s enhancements prioritized?
- Describe the upgrade cycle?
- Will NDUS be required to upgrade to the latest version when released?
Reliability and Availability:
- How does the hosted solution provide for disaster recovery?
- Describe your backup process. Discuss the frequency of backups, is the backup media stored in another location (offsite)?
- What redundancy features are available?
- How will NDUS be notified of scheduled outages?
- Is the hosting solution distributed geographically?
- Are all hosting locations within the United States? What is the physical location of each datacenter, and if hosted by a third party, also list the name of the hosting party?
- Describe high availability service levels offered.
Network Capability and Availability:
- Describe the backbone connectivity of datacenter(s) to broadband provider(s). Is there physical circuit diversity with respect to how circuits enter the datacenter(s)?
- What are the speeds of circuits entering the datacenter(s)?
- What measures are in place to mitigate single points of failure in your network connection(s) to broadband providers?
- Do you have metrics about network latency of your solution? If so, what are they?
Performance, Capacity and Scalability:
- Describe the scalability of the solution.
- What kind of load balancing options is available in and/or between the datacenter(s)?
- What load/performance testing products are used?
- Does the solution provide a means for performance monitoring by NDUS?
Security/Access Control:
- Describe the security and auditing and logging capabilities of the hosting environment.
- How does the solution provide for Single Sign-On (SSO)?
- Describe how data contained in the hosting environment is secured. Capability to encrypt data at rest? Capability to encrypt data during transport?
- Are any products used to test the security of the datacenter?
- Will NDUS be able to run application security scanning software against the hosted solution?
- Describe the physical security policy and access control in place in the datacenter. Will NDUS be provided access to the vendor datacenter?
- Does this application need to share data with other NDUS systems?
- What methods does the system support for securely sharing data with NDUS systems? Describe the secured transmission capability between the datacenter and NDUS.
- Have you conducted a SSAE16 audit of your datacenter(s)? Indicate if an SSAE16 audit report is available to the NDUS upon request.
Data Management and Records Management:
- Describe the ability and process that it is in place to return NDUS’s data upon contract termination? NDUS readable format? NDUS useable file transfer or media types?
- How is the disposal of records, which have satisfied their retention requirements, performed?
- How is a discovery request handled for the electronically stored information?
- How is a litigation hold process implemented to protect records that cannot be disposed during ongoing litigation?
Page 1 of 4