Database Hosting

The N.C. Department of Information Technology's Database Hosting team provides physical and virtual cloud database hosting solutions. Services include:

  • Administration of database infrastructure
  • Security
  • Consultation and monitoring

Two levels of service are available to meet your organization’s requirements: standard and advanced. 

Support is customized to your organization’s unique database environment. This includes proactive and reactive database care, backed by the ITIL methodology that the Database Hosting team applies to ensure high-quality service delivery and customer satisfaction.

Securing and protecting data is mission critical. That is why Database Hosting’s suite of services includes a feature-rich set of security functionality to meet your requirements. 

Database Hosting consultants work closely with your organization to plan and deploy databases, perform essential database health checks, apply solutions and maintain service-level agreements to accommodate your organization's business needs, security concerns and budgets.

Request Database Services

Getting Help

Support Get Technical Support
NCDIT Service Desk: 919-754-6000
Support Hours 24/7
Tab/Accordion Items

Features

Agency Support

The Database Hosting team responds to your organization’s critical database needs by providing preventive care that combines proactive and reactive support. This support includes disaster recovery testing, database recovery and maintaining high-priority database-vendor support relationships. 

Following best practices and applying ITIL methodology, the team daily provides standard and advanced database administration support. This includes patching, ad-hoc tasks and tailoring support tasks to each database.

Standard Database Administration Support Advanced Database Administration Support
Automated database patching

Customizing patch management based on the system and customer requirements

Restoration from backups Database installs, snapshots and flashbacks
Disk space threshold and backup integrity monitoring Replication
User administration High availability and disaster recovery
Database exports, imports and migrations Application database consulting and structure level support
Performance monitoring Performance tuning, diagnostics and reporting
Security

Knowing that protecting data is mission critical, the Database Hosting team installs the necessary services to ensure proper protection. The team also regularly applies security patches and creates secure backups. 

  • If your organization is running open-source, Database Hosting's robust, high-quality security measures prevent malicious access, especially to highly restricted data. 
  • For Oracle environments, NCDIT provides enterprise application support for Oracle Recovery Manager.

The security offering includes software licensing management and compliance, database configuration, identification, access control and 24/7, real-time environment monitoring. Other features include:

  • Encryption in transit (TNS network encryption) and at rest (storage encryption)
  • Data masking and redaction
  • Strong authentication enforcement
  • NIST compliance regulation
  • Database isolation in a secure zone
  • Research and test security patch releases
Consultation & Monitoring Services

In addition to planning and deploying databases, the Database Hosting team performs monitoring and health checks.

  • Monitoring based on business objectives helps databases continuously meet performance demands. 
  • Periodic health checks keep databases running smoothly and prevent serious issues. Checks include tracing logs growth, index fragmentation, daily/weekly backups, connections, stability, security and performance. 

After evaluating the performance of your organization’s database computing environments, the team offers solutions and service-level agreements customized to your organization’s security needs, rules and budget. Other services include:

  • Enterprise monitoring 
  • Auditing and proactive administration
  • Database architecture
  • Database security assessment
  • Cloud database migration and support

Benefits

  • Existing Oracle and SQL licensed hardware reduces customer costs compared to investing in your own on-premises database infrastructure.
  • Scale to support your application requirements.
  • Rely on connectivity between applications and their databases.
  • Remove downtime issues through high availability services.
  • Focus on delivering the applications specific to your organization without the burden of maintaining the infrastructure. 
  • Eliminate the complexity of database migrations to new cloud environments with Database Hosting’s consulting and support.
  • Stabilize operations with proactive responses to enterprise monitoring threshold alerts and service interruptions 24/7.
  • Customize service-level agreements to provide upgrades and patch schedules that support 99.9% availability of your database server.

Request Process

To request this service, or for more information, submit a ticket using the NCDIT Service Portal.

Authorization

  • Service requests that incur a cost to the agency will typically require approval from the requesting agency’s CIO, financial officer or manager, depending upon your agency's requirements. 
  • Any staff with access to the NCDIT Service Portal may engage the team for support or information.

Requirements & Customer Responsibility

Required NCDIT Services None
Other Technical Requirements & Prerequisites Customers need to possess a technical understanding of their application architecture.
Customer Responsibility
  • Agency staff are required to submit a ticket using the NCDIT Service Portal for additional support or information regarding this service. 
  • The staff and agency receiving services are also responsible for defining requirements.

Expected Delivery

Acknowledgment Time The service team should acknowledge a service request within about 2-3 business days.
Turnaround Time
  • The service team should be able to complete a well-defined service request within about 4-6 weeks.
  • Procurement and licensing steps required before the delivery of services may extend the timeline.

Customers

Suggested For Any state or local government agency as well as educational institutions
Required For None
Spotlight Customers
  • N.C. Department of Health and Human Services
  • N.C. Families Accessing Services Through Technology (NC FAST)
  • Client Services Data Warehouse
  • North Carolina Immunization Registry
  • N.C. Identity Management
  • Beacon

Support Process
  • Submit a ticket using the NCDIT Service Portal or contact the NCDIT Service Desk at 919-754-6000.
  • NCDIT provides documentation on best practices and self-help resources, administrative support for server access and service governance, assistance procuring the solution and license assignment.
Service Support Hours
  • Support for the service is available 24/7.
  • Non-production environment support is available 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. 
Service Availability The service is available 24/7, excluding planned outages and maintenance windows.
Standard Maintenance Windows Sundays: 4 a.m. to noon (or Saturdays if customer cannot accept Sunday outages)
Service Communications
  • Changes or outages that might have an impact on customers are communicated through the NCDIT Communications Hub and Agency Change Advisory Board. 
  • The agency's admin for this service will support communications to the agency users of the service..
Service Level Agreements NCDIT Global Service Level Agreement

Approved rates for this service are published in the NCDIT Rate Schedule.

View NCDIT Rate Schedule

NCDIT supports several configurations, as summarized in the table below. Both physical and virtual hosted platforms are supported within the database vendor's limitations. Support for specific advanced features not listed may be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. All service requests are initiated and documented by the NCDIT Service Portal. All database system changes are governed by NCDIT's change control policy and procedures.

Oracle Database Products & Services

Detail Oracle 19c
Red Hat Linux database installation and configuration
Solaris database installation and configuration
AIX database installation and configuration
Real application clusters
Database replication
Extended database monitoring
Super cluster

Microsoft Database Products & Services

Detail SQL 2014 SQL 2016 SQL 2017 SQL 2019
OS Windows 2016 database installation and configuration
OS Windows 2019 database installation and configuration
MS SQL always on, high availability
Database replication
Extended database monitoring

Cloud & Other Open Source Databases

  • Amazon Web Services databases
  • Azure SQL
  • MariaDB

Training & Help 

Not available

Other Related Links

None

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