No More Sleepless Nights

Steve Irons, Director, Code String

For us, our hosting platform is our business. Because we’re 100% digital, if it’s down, our business is down.

Code String delivers data driven applications for blue-chip clients. We’re really about helping clients deliver great overall solutions, and that may mean that we build just a single API to an entire web application running across 18 markets in the world. We do a lot of competitions and they can be straightforward prize draws to more complex algorithms, where we work out what we call winning moments.

Most of our clients tend to be blue-chip, multinational kind of clients, so, examples of some of those might be McDonald’s, where we work with them in Europe, but also predominately in the UK. Clients like Bose, TomTom, we’ve done work with Microsoft, Nestle, so it tends to be larger companies that want to work across territories. We don’t have a marketing department, we don’t have a sales department – we only sell through our relationship network, so we would never want to let a client down, so for us every application, every promotion is critical.

In choosing Secura in the first place, we were impressed by how reactive and enthusiastic the team was here. We actually discovered them last in the process and yet they delivered their quote first. We felt that the relationship was good right from the beginning. The team on the Secura side were able to build the entire infrastructure, and then when it came time to switch it over, we just did a diff match on the servers and the actual downtime to any of our clients was less than two hours, which having come from a situation where the hosting had failed for many hours, that was a massive achievement.

Since then, we’ve also moved servers between various different clouds, and each time there’s been zero downtime. I think working with Secura has really helped with that because they’re able to consult with us on the best way to do it, when to move things and if we say that it’s critical, it’s done at 2 in the morning – that’s when it gets done. Many of them have seen high profile security and data leaks from well known brands. They want to be able to reassure that their customers, their data is safe, and so they’re looking for providers that can provide that secure environment.

I think we’re reassured by the accreditations that Secura have, but also the conversations that we’ve had with the technical teams, where we always have security in mind when we’re building any solution. I go into a client pitch now with full confidence that we are going to be able to deliver it from a hosting point of view. From a technical point of view, they tick all the boxes that you would expect from any professional hosting company. What Secura have delivered over and above that is around the service, and the reactiveness of the staff and our relationship with Secura – I think that’s where Secura add real value to the technology.

So, the key difference for me between Secura and our previous hosting supplier is that I’m not having sleepless nights anymore.