Happy Holidays from blueAPACHE

Happy holidays from blueAPACHE

As another year closes, we want to take a moment to thank our clients and partners for their trust, and to wish everyone a safe and restful break.

Holiday support arrangements

Always log through the service desk rather than contacting an individual engineer — the queue is monitored continuously and routed to whoever is on shift.

The telecommunications industry embargo

This is the constraint most clients only discover when it affects them.

Each year the Australian telecommunications industry applies a change embargo over the peak season — in the 2016–17 period it ran from 16 December to 9 January. Carriers suspend non-essential provisioning and change activity to protect network stability at the time of highest national demand, when retail trading, logistics, travel and payments all peak simultaneously.

What it affects: new service provisioning, bandwidth changes, site relocations and cutovers, non-urgent carrier-side configuration.

What it does not affect: fault restoration on existing services, which continues throughout — the embargo restricts change, not repair. Fixed wireless services are also excepted and can generally still be provisioned, which makes fixed wireless a useful option for an urgent December requirement. blueAPACHE's own platform and managed services are unaffected.

Planning implication: if a connectivity change matters to your business in January, order it before the embargo. Requests submitted into the window queue behind everything else deferred, and the post-embargo backlog extends lead times well into the new year.

What we keep doing while you are away

Where blueAPACHE manages your environment, the following continue uninterrupted through the entire break:

• Infrastructure and application monitoring across managed systems
• Backup job monitoring and failure alerting
• Security monitoring and incident response
• Carrier fault escalation on existing services
• Emergency change where required to restore service

Most of this is invisible — conditions identified and remediated before they become incidents, with no ticket ever raised.

A short pre-shutdown checklist

1. Tell us who can authorise. Names and mobile numbers for anyone who can approve a change or authorise emergency work while your usual approver is away.
2. Define your change freeze, including exemptions. Security patching for an actively exploited vulnerability generally should not be frozen.
3. Test a restore, not a backup report.
4. Check what expires in the window — certificates, licences, domains, subscriptions, scheduled jobs, billing runs.
5. Brief your people: no payment or bank-detail change without a voice call to a known number.
6. Set internal expectations so nobody assumes a routine request will be handled the same day.

Frequently asked questions

What stays the same over the holiday period? Proactive infrastructure monitoring and emergency or critical incident response continue unchanged at 24/7, including on all public holidays. Escalated priority support remains available on call.

What changes? Business-day operational support is reduced and unavailable on gazetted public holidays; project and change delivery is paused other than pre-agreed work; and carrier-dependent connectivity work is subject to the industry embargo.

What is the telecommunications industry embargo? An annual change embargo the Australian telecommunications industry applies over the peak season — in the 2016–17 period it ran from 16 December to 9 January. Carriers suspend non-essential provisioning and change activity to protect network stability at the point of highest national demand, when retail trading, logistics, travel and payments peak simultaneously.

What does the embargo actually stop? New service provisioning, bandwidth changes, site relocations and cutovers, and non-urgent carrier-side configuration.

What is not affected by it? Fault restoration on existing services continues throughout — the embargo restricts change, not repair. Fixed wireless is also excepted and can generally still be provisioned, which makes it a useful option for an urgent December requirement. blueAPACHE's own platform and managed services are unaffected.

What should we do if we need a connectivity change in January? Order it before the embargo. Requests submitted into the window queue behind everything else deferred, and the post-embargo backlog extends lead times well into the new year.

What does blueAPACHE keep doing while our office is closed? Infrastructure and application monitoring across managed systems, backup job monitoring and failure alerting, security monitoring and incident response, carrier fault escalation on existing services, and emergency change where required to restore service. Most of it is invisible — conditions remediated before they become incidents, with no ticket ever raised.

What should we do before shutting down? Tell blueAPACHE who can authorise changes, with names and mobile numbers; define the change freeze including exemptions, noting that patching for an actively exploited vulnerability generally should not be frozen; test an actual restore rather than a backup report; check what expires in the window, including certificates, licences, domains, subscriptions, scheduled jobs and billing runs; brief people that no payment or bank-detail change proceeds without a voice call to a known number; and set internal expectations so nobody assumes a routine request will be handled same-day.

How should issues be logged over the break? Always through the service desk rather than to an individual engineer, because the queue is monitored continuously and routed to whoever is on shift.

Related

• Support
• Support and service levels
• Connectivity — including fixed wireless
• Core network and data centre interconnect
• Managed services
• Security services
• Managed detection and response
• Offsite backup as a service
• Disaster recovery as a service
• Offices and contact
• Service agreement
• Contact

Thank you

Thank you for another year of partnership. We wish you, your teams and your families a safe and enjoyable holiday season, and we look forward to continuing to support your business in the year ahead.

blueAPACHE was founded in 1998 and today employs more than 280 staff across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Miami. The company operates three geographically diverse data centres on Australia's eastern seaboard, commits to 99.999% availability for emPOWER Cloud and 99.99% for Connectivity under a redundant design, holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification (certificate 202507-118, Sensiba Australia, valid 1 August 2025 to 1 August 2028), and has received more than 90 industry awards.

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