Objectives

The primary objectives of this tender are to engage a service provider that will assist Agrément South Africa with:

• Internet connection support, firewall management, maintenance, and active monitoring of two fibre lines (each 100 Mbps with load balancing).
• Ensuring high availability, resilience, and security of the network infrastructure at the Hatfield offices for a period of 36 months.
• Supporting the standardization and assessment of construction-related products and systems in South Africa and internationally.

Scope

The scope includes:

• Provision, configuration, and support of two independent fibre optic internet links from different ISPs, each with a minimum capacity of 100 Mbps.
• Implementation of load balancing and automatic failover between the two fibre links.
• Support, configuration, and maintenance of ASA’s enterprise firewall, including security updates and incident response.
• Continuous 24/7 monitoring of internet links and firewall performance, fault detection, logging, escalation, and resolution.
• Provision of regular performance and availability reports over the contract period.

Technical Requirements

The technical specifications for the service provider include:

• Supply and management of two fibre internet connections, each with at least 100 Mbps bandwidth, provisioned via diverse routes or upstream providers.
• Guarantee of at least 99.9% uptime for uplink and downlink per month, with monthly and quarterly uptime reports.
• Ensure latency, jitter, and packet loss are within acceptable enterprise standards.
• Provision of static public IP addresses as needed.
• Compliance with South African ICT and telecommunications regulations.
• Supply, configuration, and management of an enterprise-grade firewall (physical or virtual), with advanced security features.
• Adherence to specified response and resolution times based on incident severity levels.

Skills Requirements

The service provider must demonstrate:

• Experience in managing fibre optic internet connections, load balancing, and failover configurations.
• Expertise in enterprise firewall support, security patching, firmware upgrades, and incident response.
• Proficiency in network monitoring, fault detection, and reporting.
• Ability to ensure high availability and security standards aligned with enterprise requirements.
• Knowledge of South African ICT and telecommunications compliance standards.