Critical SaaS Hosting

Richard Dunn, IT Manager, Causeway

Richard Dunn: So, I’m the IT Manager at Causeway and that means I have overall responsibility for both our hosted platform as well as our internal business systems. Causeway’s SaaS platform is critical to our business and critical to our customers. If our business is down, that means our customers can’t access their invoices, can’t access their vehicle fleet tracking and telemetry data. And in the modern era, computing systems are expected to be on 100% of the time, and our customers expect our platform to be the same.

Oliver Beaton, CEO, Secura

So, the SaaS model is a huge part of our customer base. So probably 70% of our customer base is our SaaS businesses, so software houses.

Richard Dunn, IT Manager, Causeway

Causeway has a range of software for the full lifecycle of the construction industry. That means we’re one of the only providers that can give a 360-degree view of the built environment. Our hosting provider needs to be able to guarantee us uptime, guarantee us performance and reliability and guarantee us service when we need it. The software as a service differs from the on-prem footprint on the basis that everything that supports that software now becomes the responsibility of the vendor. So, Causeway, now along with Secura, have to take full responsibility for the delivery of our application and its continued uptime. So Secura’s proposal contained not only the required technology stack that we wanted, but the knowledge with the people that work there made us feel confident they’d be able to help partner us in producing and delivering the software for our customers.

Oliver Beaton, CEO, Secura

So, the Virtual Private Cloud platform that we’ve developed at Secura is a fantastic fit for software applications and the flexibility of the platform is obviously a huge benefit. So a lot of software houses, they will, you know, be adding new customers all the time. And being able to scale on the platform in line with those new customer acquisitions is something that’s really important to them. So you’re not having to overspend on your platform ahead of the revenue that you generate from your customer base.

Richard Dunn, IT Manager, Causeway

Causeway have a breadth of software over 15 applications that we currently host in the VPC, that means we’ve got 150 servers at any one time running on Secura’s platform. The technology that underpins that VPC enables us to silo off each one of our products into a separate V App that gives us complete application portability between data centres. And one of the key things that Secura provided for us was a DR capability. So all of our V Apps always replicated to a secondary data centre. And the resource is not just sitting there being unused, we can utilise the resources of the disaster recovery centre.

Causeway’s Cloud Platform goes both organically through expansion of our data sets, as well as the addition of new applications for our customer base. This means that Causeway’s platform has grown by 50% on the Secura VPC in the last three years since we’ve been hosted there. The flexibility and scalability of this platform means that it’s easy for us to do this and just consume the resources as we require them.

Oliver Beaton, CEO, Secura

We are very much an extension of a software house’s internal support team. And we have to be, because we’re so closely tied in delivering that service. The application, obviously critical, but the infrastructure that application lives on has to be very tightly married to the application to ensure a smooth delivery to the customer base.

Richard Dunn, IT Manager, Causeway

The benefits of working with Secura are really the people that work there. The knowledge and support that they’ve brought us to the team at Causeway have really helped us push our platform to the next level.