System upgrades offer valuable benefits to utilities in terms of new functionality and security updates. Prior to installing them, however, it’s vital that utilities test all new releases in an offline environment prior to deploying them in the production environment. No matter how thoroughly a vendor’s quality assurance process, this testing by the utility will confirm that everything works as expected in their own, unique environment.

For best results, utilities need an offline environment designed specifically for quality assurance; this will enable them to protect their production environment from any issue that could crash the system, such as hardware firmware updates, operating system patches, and software upgrades, updates, and hotfixes.

While Survalent applies a rigorous quality assurance process before releasing any maintenance or product release, the SurvalentONE Quality Assurance System (QAS) provides utilities with the peace of mind that Survalent kits, hardware firmware updates, operating system patches, and third-party software updates are safe for use in their production system.

Using the Quality Assurance System, administrators can recreate their entire production ADMS environment in an offline environment.  Users can functionally replicate their entire production environment (i.e. any Survalent product or server) in the Quality Assurance System to simulate their operation in a variety of scenarios before real-world implementation. This can include full regression tests to ensure all implementation steps and procedures are accurate. For added assurance, the Quality Assurance System’s SmartVU GUI uses unique coloring to easily distinguish it from a real-time connection with the network.