RM Unify users across the UK depend on RM Unify to access their on-line services and rightly have high expectations that the service will be available and responsive whenever they want to use it.
RM Unify runs from Microsoft Azure's datacentre in Dublin, Ireland and both Microsoft Azure and RM Unify itself are designed for high availability and to handle a wide range of situations where things might go wrong.
Behind the scenes, we have been working hard to make the service even more resilient by developing a secondary RM Unify environment in the Microsoft Azure datacentre in Amsterdam. This now gives us even greater capability to maintain the availability of RM Unify even in more unlikely problem situations such as if major issues occur in the Azure Dublin datacentre.
As part of our planning for RM Unify business continuity and disaster recovery, we will be running a full disaster recovery exercise on Saturday July 21st.
We have chosen this date as it falls during the brief period when schools and colleges are on holiday across the whole of the UK and so the number of expected users of the service will be at a minimum. We have already successfully conducted disaster recovery tests on some individual elements of the service with no impact to our end users. A full disaster recovery test, however, has more risk of affecting live service, which is why we have planned to run this test during a weekend in order to further minimise the risk of impacting any active users.
We do not expect there to be major disruption to RM Unify during the testing exercise but it is possible that there could be some interruption to service or some degradation in performance particularly during the period when we switchover live service from one Azure datacentre to another. If you do experience any issues on the day, please check the RM Unify Status page where we will keep customers updated on the progress of the testing and any issues that we identify. You can also subscribe to updates on the status of RM Unify and apps via e-mail from this page, which means that you will be notified automatically about any RM Unify maintenance work or service issues.
Network Administrators
When we move RM Unify live service between different data centres, this will change the IP addresses that are used by the service. If you have any IP blocking rules in place to restrict access to Web sites then you should check that your rules allow access to all IP addresses in both Microsoft Azure North and West Europe in order to guarantee that your users can continue to use RM Unify. You can find a list of these addresses in this Microsoft article. It is also worth bearing in mind that the Microsoft Azure IP address ranges do change from time to time and so we recommend that you keep any IP address rules updated appropriately.