Service Level Agreement
Information Technology Services
The University of Texas at Austin
Effective Date: May 5, 2009
Score
Overview
The Mail Filtering Service provides reliable mail delivery, spam filtering and virus protection for mail servers across campus. This service can (1) act as a gateway for incoming mail for departmental mail servers, (2) act as a gateway for outbound e-mail and, (3) act as an unauthenticated e-mail relay for authorized devices.
Review Process
This document defines the practices that Information Technology Services (ITS) will use for the Mail Filtering service. The details of this document may be reviewed and amended as required, or at least annually, to accurately reflect business and service needs.
Time Conventions
Unless otherwise indicated, business hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, excluding holidays and reduced schedule days.
Scope
The following user communities at the university are the intended direct recipients for the Mail Filtering service: Administrators of e-mail servers on campus.
The following user communities at the university are the indirect recipients for the Mail Filtering service: Students, Faculty, and Staff.
Service Criticality
This service has been identified as Critical, based on the ITS Critical Services Assessment Criteria. Please refer to the Critical Services Assessment Criteria for more information on the assessment methodology.
Service Description
This service consists of a number of IronPort e-mail security appliances, IronPort anti spam software, Sophos antivirus software and an e-mail filtering programming language that can be used for customized defenses against threats not caught by vendor supplied software. ITS reserves the right to create or modify these customized defenses as security needs warrant. These modifications can include but are not limited to adding disclaimers to messages, changing subject lines or other message headers, suppressing or quarantining potentially dangerous content or messages. Change notification methods are described below.
Supported Computing Environment
This service can support any e-mail servers that adhere to the SMTP e-mail standards.
Technical Support
End users always start with Tier 1, which is basic support.
Tier 1 Support
End users should contact their normal support channels such as their departmental help desk if applicable or the ITS Help Desk.
Tier 2 Support
Departmental IT support staff can contact ITS Help Desk about issues with this service. The phone number for ITS Help Desk is 475-9400. The e-mail address for the Help Desk is help@its.utexas.edu
Tier 3 Support
The ITS-Systems UNIX group is the next tier of support for this service. The Help Desk can escalate issues to the UNIX group. ITS UNIX group has established mailing lists on utlists.utexas.edu and subscribed departmental e-mail administrators. This e-mail list will be used by the UNIX staff to communicate to e-mail administrators. There is a distinct mailing list for each of the three aspects of this service.
Special Support
ITS-Systems UNIX group has an ongoing support contract with IronPort in case they need to escalate problems to the vendor.
Service Availability
This section provides information about the normal schedule of times when the service is available, the times specified for scheduled maintenance, and defines expectations for reporting service problems and changes.
Normal Service Availability
This service is available 24x7x365
Scheduled Maintenance
Scheduled maintenance for the Mail Filtering service is essential for upgrades and to maintain security. Due to the architecture of this service most maintenance tasks can be done on servers on a rolling basis and thus will not require any down time for the service as a whole. In extreme cases where a service outage is necessary ITS staff will provide notification on the ITS Services Status page. A message will be sent to e-mail administrators via the mailing lists created on utlists.utexas.edu.
Problem Reporting and Change Notification
ITS will notify customers using the ITS Services Status page of service availability and service delivery issues for the Mail Filtering.
Key Service Indicators
List of Metrics/Measures
This service is designed to be available 99.9% of the time and to have a delivery delay of less than 1 hour. Any exceptions to this delivery delay during business hours will be communicated to the appropriate e-mail administrators.
Dependencies
This service is hosted at the University Data Center (UDC) and thus its availability is dependent on power, cooling, network and load balancing services at the UDC.
Service Report Card
ITS will publish performance for this service in the public ITS Services Report Card.
Other Party Responsibilities
In addition to the services provided by ITS, subscribers (users) of the service and identified owners/administrators agree to certain important responsibilities. All parties agree to be aware of and adhere to the university's Acceptable Use Policy.
User/Subscriber Responsibilities
Subscriber agrees to:
- End users should contact their normal support channels.
Departmental IT Support Staff
- E-mail administrators who request this service will need to provide accurate information about their e-mail system, including the mail domains to be protected, the host names of the mail servers that serve these domains, and whether spam should be deleted or merely tagged with an X-header. Any changes to this information will need to be communicated to ITS in a timely manner.
- Departmental IT staff will provide ITS the name and contact information of e-mail administrators who will then be subscribed to the appropriate mailing list(s) established for the service(s) they have signed up for. Departmental IT staff will inform ITS if there are any changes to their staff information.
- It is expected that the information provided by ITS to the mailing lists will be noted and if necessary acted upon. E-mail administrators will need to adhere to best practices for postmasters. Departmental administrators should take steps to insure attackers are prohibited from bypassing our IronPorts to connect to their servers directly.
- In cases where ITS staff detect problems such as e-mail loops they will contact the e-mail administrator(s) to request remediation. In extreme cases where this problem affects the whole service ITS might take action to remedy the situation first before contacting the customer.
- In cases where ITS staff detect problems with outbound and mail relay which might affect the whole service they might take direct action and then inform e-mail administrators.
Cost of Service
ITS has purchased licenses to cover all students, faculty, and staff on campus. This service is provided at no extra cost to departments around campus. This license is negotiated every three years.
