Hosting is provided at a flat subscription fee with lower up-front investment and predictable annual payments. The overall costs for hardware, applications and management can be greatly reduced.

No district time is required to troubleshoot environment issues or update software versions. All this is done behind the scenes, which means the district can spend more resources on other critical projects.

Server and software updates are done regularly as part of the annual hosting fee, as such; the district is always running on the latest version of the software in the most stable and secure environment that can be provided.

Maplewood has extensive knowledge and experience on setting up, migrating and implementing Maplewood Enterprise. Within a few weeks the district can be set up and hosted.

The Hosting service is a robust hardware infrastructure based on the best IT practices for superior levels of availability, backup, and disaster recovery. The hosting facility is connected to redundant uninterruptible power supplies capable of running the servers for hours, and continues to provide uninterrupted access to data. Fail-over backup servers and redundant hardware are utilized to take over hardware failures. Data is managed on a SAN server for the highest level of data integrity and redundancy. Backups are also done regularly to provide a quick restore point in the unlikely event a SAN failure.

Demands and distribution of loads on the servers are managed by hardware and software resources, this includes the use of clustering, load balancing and distributed architectures. Critical loads are reported, and additional servers can be added to the cluster at anytime without interrupting service.

Maplewood handles all the regular maintenance and upkeep of the servers to ensure that hard disk, memory, backup, OS patches and other resource issues are caught before they cause downtime. All updates, including Maplewood software, are done during off hours.

Maplewood follows Microsoft's Best Practices for deploying and implementing Web Servers including lock down procedures. OS and security patches are updated regularly, verified on test servers, and then updated on production servers. Access to data is secure. All communication between the server and the web browser is encrypted through SSL or VPN, checked for viruses, malicious code, and phishing attacks using Trend Micro InterScan software. As well, user account policy, port management, and firewall configuration help to keep data safe and secure.

Applications are delivered through the Internet using existing web browsers. No additional IT resources are required to update the client systems. Optionally the Remote Desktop Connection program, included with Windows 2000 and above, can be used to connect to your data.

One of Maplewood's core competencies is the knowledge and expertise of managing and updating servers. Maplewood has a team of dedicated professionals with many years of experience implementing, deploying, and troubleshooting servers. Our technical team has been involved in many centralized implementations ranging from 100 to 25000 students, and servicing thousands of users.