Business Continuity Planning for AlayaCare Cloud users

• Context
• What is not affected during downtime
• First response
  • Pausing automated tasks
  • Connectivity and data storage
• Sample scenarios and recommended operations
• Important notes about Staging environments
• Additional ideas and resources

Context

AlayaCare may encounter situations where a technical bug, a component failure, a power outage, a security incident or issues related to a third-party service provider prevent us from being 100% operational and functional to your organization's needs. When critical components of, or the full AlayaCare Cloud (ACC) platform has, or is likely to, become unavailable for at least a day, your organization may need to implement certain processes or operations in order to minimize the impact of downtime and to ensure business continues.

This article highlights our recommendations to you. The content listed here is to maximize your organization's operational capabilities and continue to deliver home care service during our downtime. We place a particular emphasis on patient care and the enablement of schedulers, coordinators, personal support workers, and nurses.

Please note that prolonged system unavailability has been very rare at AlayaCare. From 2021 up to the present time, we have always resolved availability issues in a few hours or sooner. In 2024, the average Meantime to Recovery (MTTR) for all availability incidents is one (1) hour. Our site reliability teams also monitor the platform and all components 24/7 and act as soon as a component failure is detected or when a component reaches the failure threshold.

What is not affected during downtime

During an ACC downtime, our internal services, such as email and customer communication via phone, Zendesk ticketing system, and alayacare.status.io, should remain unaffected. Customer communication with AlayaCare team members will continue according to the defined SLA.

First response

Pausing automated tasks

As a "first response" to downtime, AlayaCare recommends that you temporarily pause certain automated tasks like intakes, billing, accounting, and payroll operations. 

Connectivity and data storage

We have 3 recommendations for you in terms of connectivity and data storage.

1. We strongly recommend all customers regularly subscribe to a Snowflake reader or consumer account on a direct connection to ensure access to their data during a critical downtime.

2. We also advise customers to proactively use our recommended Continuity Dashboards, available upon request in our Data Exploration (DE) module, and incorporate any additional requirements for your business continuity requirements. The dashboards are as follows:

• Employee Roster Report
• Client Roster Report including Services
• Client Risks and Allergies Report
• Equipment and Supplies Report
• Employee Schedules Report
• Vacant Visits Report
• Employee Availability Report
• Client Care Plan (ADL) Report
• Client Current Active Medication List Report

3. Finally, we suggest that you work with your internal IT and operation teams to find ways to store this data for a 24-hour period. For example, you can establish a manual workflow where you download the dashboards daily or weekly to a secure folder. Please make sure that all of your protected health information (PHI) is stored in a way that is compliant with HIPAA/PHIPA and any other local information security regulations/laws in vigour.

Sample scenarios and recommended operations

Below is a list of potential scenarios and our operational recommendations.

Function type	Critical
Scenario	ACC's web app is not available in production, and the care worker app is also unavailable. Authentication and/or scheduling is not available, but the staging environment is still available. You otherwise have a direct connection to your Snowflake account with access to your AlayaCare Data.
What we do	We will work to restore production within 24 hours as per the critical SLA.
What we recommend	We recommend using your staging environment, which has data from the previous day, as a read-only solution. You are then to log in. Coordination teams are instructed to begin your organization’s internal manual processes for collecting AlayaCare data during the downtime. Coordination teams can still provide field workers with the information they need through the staging environment as a read-only solution. Your staging environment's URL should be yourorganization.staging.alayacare.ca Refer to this section on what the read-only environment offers. Once the system is restored, coordination teams may enter all information collected during the downtime. You should then redirect all back office and care worker app users to return to the production environment, whose URL should be yourorganization.alayacare.com. If production is down for more than 24 hours, note that staging refresh will be turned off to allow functionality to continue, as stated above.
Systems not operational at this time	AlayaApps AlayaCare Connector Custom Form Templates  IVR Telephony Production environment  Production environment's API integrations  Single Sign On (SSO)

Function type	Critical
Scenario	ACC's web app is not available in both production and staging. The care worker app is also unavailable.  You otherwise have a direct connection to your Snowflake account with access to your AlayaCare Data.
What we do	We will work to restore production within 24 hours as per the critical SLA.
What we recommend	Your Snowflake account will let you keep access to all relevant data during the downtime period and is the safest option for data retrieval. We suggest you leverage pre-built dashboards, SFTPs and stored reports. Once the system is restored, coordination teams may enter all information collected during the downtime. You should then redirect all your users to return to the production and staging environments.
Systems not operational at this time	AlayaApps AlayaCare Connector Custom Form Templates  Data Exploration IVR Telephony Production and staging environments Production and staging environments' API integrations  Single Sign On (SSO)

Function type	Essential
Scenario	The Client Intake, Employee Intake, and Scheduling modules are not working in ACC.
What we do	We will work to restore production within 24 hours as per the critical SLA.
What we recommend	You should instruct coordination teams to begin your organization’s internal manual processes for collecting and actioning data during downtime. Once the system is restored, coordination teams may enter all information collected during the downtime. Once the system is restored, coordination teams may enter all information collected during the downtime. You should then inform your users that these modules are available again.
Systems not operational at this time	N/A

Function type	Essential
Scenario	The Billing and Payroll modules are not working in ACC.
What we do	We will work to restore production within 24 hours as per the critical SLA.
What we recommend	You should delay billing and payroll runs until these modules are restored. If billing or payroll cannot be delayed, use Data Exploration to pull your relevant billing data. You should then inform your users that these modules are available again.
Systems not operational at this time	N/A

Function type	Essential
Scenario	Your care worker app is not connected to the internet and is in what is known as Offline mode.
What we do	We recommend that you regularly remind your organization that the Offline mode is readily available outside of unscheduled or scheduled downtime. It is also recommended when the mobile app user does not have WiFi access or is in a remote area.
What we recommend	Refer to this article for more information and best practices.
Systems not operational at this time	N/A

Important notes about Staging environments

Below is a list of statuses the environments will be in and the context for each status. Please note that all time schedules listed below are listed in AM/PM and are in Eastern Standard Time (EST) unless otherwise listed.

Read Only: The staging environment (excluding Data Exploration) is reset every night with a replica of your production environment. Staging is valuable for viewing necessary client information, but documentation must be completed in production.

Caution: Data in the Staging environment is always a copy of production data from the night before. The copy of production data is captured at approximately 11:00 pm EST the night before for USA/CAN environments and 8:00 am EST (10:00 pm AEST the night before) for ANZ/INT environments. They will become available in Staging environments by 2:00 am EST for USA/CAN environments and 9:00 am EST (11:00 pm AEST with some variance due to daylight saving times) for ANZ/INT environments.

Any changes or updates made in Production earlier in the current day will not show up in Staging. Note that this excludes DE, as DE is not necessarily a copy of Production from the previous day.

Notify Mobile Users: Retrieve the visit information report from staging and send relevant information to staff for reference.

Return to Production: When you see this status, please advise all team members to return to your Production environment once the downtime has ended. This will prevent work from mistakenly being completed in Staging.

Additional ideas and resources

Here is a list of other ideas and resources.

1. Build a business connectivity plan for your organization, and make sure you check and confirm its details regularly. Communicate the plan and its details to your organization.
2. Consider printing relevant AlayaCare Zendesk articles to ensure that you have access to the information during downtime, in particular when there is a power or internet outage which is out of everyone's control, as the connectivity issue may be prolonged.
3. The AlayaCare Trust Center (exclusively available in English only) provides additional resources and has an FAQ about compliance framework, controls, sub-processors, data security and privacy, and details on applicable local/international laws and regulations.