With a SaaS deployment, we've simplified your institution's operations.
Product support
Product support for the Blackboard Learn software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment is handled by Blackboard Support.
Service levels
Learn in the Cloud will be provided under a 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).
For more information about the SLA, including the service credit policy, refer to your Blackboard contract or contact your account executive.
Updates and maintenance
As with most SaaS models, updates and maintenance are automatic. Updates will be regularly applied by Blackboard.
Minor updates such as patches, maintenance, bug fixes, and minor enhancements may not be communicated prior to deployment.
Larger updates that require change management on your campus will be deployed in inactive/disabled states. Then, you can explore the major enhancements or new functionality on your test instances before activating or enabling it in production. Such changes will be communicated in a fashion similar to past enterprise releases.
Upgrade notifications for administrators
In the Ultra and Original Experiences, System administrators for Learn deployed in SaaS can opt-in to receive email notifications when an upgrade process starts and completes. This is particularly helpful for SaaS clients who want to be able to communicate with their support teams and user communities, with greater specificity when feature changes are available or bug fixes have been implemented.
Users with the full System Administrator role can opt-in at Admin Panel > Notifications > System Alert Settings. Each administrator must opt-in individually to receive emails.
Resiliency
The Learn SaaS offering is deployed using a cloud fabric infrastructure that leverages multiple Availability Zones. Each Availability Zone is a discrete fault domain, meaning that it provides a high degree of isolation from infrastructure failures in other Availability Zones.
If a failure occurs on resources in one Availability Zone, servers in the other Availability Zones maintain continuity of service, and additional resources can be brought online in other Availability Zones in near-real time to ensure the system maintains the needed capacity.
Backup
All customer and unique system data is backed up at least once a day to at least two discrete physical locations using highly durable storage. Backups are maintained for at least 30 days.
