NOTIFICATION PURPOSE

To address client concerns regarding two recent server outages (March 14th & April 9th) which caused multiple disruptions in the use of Rapid ERP and associated services.

ROOT CAUSE of SERVICE OUTAGE

Primary Hardware Raid Clusters became out of sync in the datacenter facilities disrupting the operation of the Windows Server 2012 operating system and the services of Rapid ERP.

DISCUSSION of SERVICE OUTAGE

OUTAGE EXPLANATION

We regret the disruption of Rapid ERP services that occurred recently on two separate occasions and want to take the time to elaborate on these service outages. Although we had overall intermittent outages in excess of 4 hours on each occasion, the interval of the outages were no more than 15 minutes on average.

Outages were not caused by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service – an attack which attempts to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with fake traffic from multiple sources). Rather, these outages were caused by the complexity required in our server infrastructure in order to provide ongoing redundancy.

SERVER CAPACITY

Rapid Applications Group’s server datacenters have been designed to scale hundreds of times the current ongoing needs of our customer base. Within the past twelve months our servers have never exceeded 20% of capacity.

As Rapid Apps continues to grow we continue to add hardware and software configurations which occasionally are the root cause of minimal downtime. Although you may experience occasional interruption with Rapid ERP services, we would like to reiterate that such downtimes are most always less than 15 min intervals.

SERVER REDUNDANCY

Rapid Apps hosts its services in multiple datacenter locations utilizing Microsoft Azure and Liquid Web. Being multi-location hosted, at no time is any client data exposed to potential loss. All hardware, including and not limited to power supply, CPUs, hard drives, memory, motherboards, network connections, etc. are all paired with multiple redundant back-ups in these datacenters. In addition to our two datacenters, data is further protected by back-up to Google Drive Platform ensuring further redundancy and no potential for data loss.

SERVER SECURITY

Security of your company’s data is of utmost importance to Rapid Apps. Because of the seriousness of this issue, we provide protection via combinations of hardware and software firewalls along with adequate DDoS protection. The Rapid Apps server infrastructure has undergone multiple outside firm security penetration tests as well as PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance reviews.

OPERATING SYSTEM SUPPORT

In terms of OS (operating system) support, any platform Microsoft continues to develop an/or support Rapid Apps will also provide ongoing support for. Currently, this includes Windows 7 to Windows 10. However, we do recommend that our clients adopt the latest version of Windows 10 whenever possible because we see less support issues with Rapid ERP on this MS OS version. Please be aware that given the constraint our developers are under to comply with these Windows versions it is ALWAYS necessary for your computers to have installed the latest required AND optional updates in order to run Rapid ERP on Windows 7 though Windows 10.

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOUR COMPANY’S FUTURE

Certainly, your company counts on the Rapid Apps Team to provide you with the latest technological advances in Rapid ERP and associated services that will provide any competitive advantage in this industry. Moving forward, Rapid Apps will continue to strive to mitigate any potential negative impact from such technological migrations. We are balancing many challenges in providing what is certainly the very best in solutions for your concrete pumping company operations and the concrete pumping industry as a whole. It is our hope that as we continue to grow, our budget and exceptional knowledge of technology will provide Amazon, Google-like reliability and that such service outages will be a thing of the past.

Thanks for your patronage and patience,

Rapid Applications Group