Basic Disclosure certificates with convictions 2019/2020: FOI release

Information requested

For the years 2019 and 2020, please provide the percentage of Basic Disclosure certificates with convictions.

Please provide the total number of hours of planned system outages or downtime for the year 2020 and the reasons with percentages. Please advise how many hours occurred during the working day, ie. during the flexi period of 7am-7pm on weekdays. Please advise why this could not be carried out outof- hours or while the system was running.

Response

The answer to your question is
Q. For the year 2020, please provide the percentage of Basic Disclosure certificates with convictions.
A. 8.71%

Q. For the year 2019, please provide the percentage of Basic Disclosure certificates with convictions.
A. 9.15%

Q. Please provide the total number of hours of planned system outages or downtime for the year 2020 and the reasons with percentages. Please advise how many hours occurred during the working day, ie. during the flexi period of 7am-7pm on weekdays. Please advise why this could not be carried out out of hours or while the system was running.
A. Across the Disclosure Scotland estate, 186.16 hours of downtime was experienced in 2020.

Please note that these combine internal and external outages. There is not a breakdown available to show outages to external users only as when impact to external users is noted, internal users are also impacted.

The reasons with percentages:

Release downtime accounts for 56% of downtime occurrences.
Patching downtime accounts for 13% of downtime outage occurrences
Data loads accounts for 17% of the downtime occurrences
Unplanned downtime (incidents) accounts for 14% of occurrences.

Please advise how many hours occurred during the working day, ie. during the flexi period of 7am-7pm on weekdays:

All downtime took place during the flexi hour period mentioned, with the majority of the downtime commencing at 16:00.

Please advise why this could not be carried out out-of-hours or while the system was running:

Our current platform architecture has microservices which run as a single instance/service hosted on their own dedicated virtual machines (hosted on cloud infrastructure). During a release if the microservice is being updated, the service must be stopped and restarted causing an outage. These
virtual machines are unable to scale beyond a single instance - this means zero downtime type releases are not currently possible.

Examples of when we need to plan downtime/system outages:

Downtime for our internal staff when:

• A microservice is being updated
• OS or Application patching is taking place
• Housekeeping services are being run on databases and or data
• Infrastructure upgrades/maintenance are required to internal services

For external users downtime will be required if any of the front end services:

• Receive an update
• OS/Application Patched
• Infrastructure upgrades/maintenance

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