Reliable and Secure SaaS Hosting
GroupBC develops and delivers document and information management software solutions for the design, construction and operation of built assets.
GroupBC’s Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions enable users to easily control and manage projects, programmes and asset delivery, with tools to capture and report on data, facilitate Building Information Modelling (BIM), and assisting with bid and tender management.
With software solutions that are vital to the every day global operations of their customers, who include Sainsbury’s, Balfour Beatty, Costain, Nationwide and Thames Water, a smooth and efficient migration was essential to GroupBC.
In the video case study below, GroupBC’s Systems Manager, Paul Robinson, explains how the Secura team pro-actively planned and implemented their migration of data and services, and gives details of the secure and reliable service they have experienced so far on the Virtual Private Cloud.
Click the header above for the full text transcript of the GroupBC case study video.
Paul Robinson, Systems Manager, GroupBC:
I’m Paul Robinson from GroupBC. I’m the Systems Manager with responsibility for our Software as a Service (SaaS) hosting. GroupBC is a software company.
We’ve been involved with online collaboration, mainly in the construction industry, for about 20 years now. We offer a suite of online collaboration tools. Those tools support all our customers in the digital construction process.
We have customers all around the world who are relying on our software to access their project-related documents on large projects all around the world. They need access 24/7, so reliability is key. As well as that, security is a huge consideration and getting even more so these days.
We came to Secura with quite a challenging set of requirements, particularly, in terms of the amount of data that we were trying to migrate and secure and they managed to provide a specific solution for us that accommodated those data requirements.
The set of machines that we have running at Secura are our business. Our clients rely on those 24/7, and without them, we do not have business. Secura performed very well during the migration responding to all the issues that arose. It was a 16-week period where we had regular catch up meetings to go over any issues, and they proposed solutions, implemented them, and really just pushed things forward.
Dan Nichols, CTO, Secura:
We’ve got a standard migration methodology. It doesn’t define exactly how the migration works, it defines the process that we use because ultimately every client environment we migrate is slightly different but the same methodology is reliable and tested and works for pretty much every migration project we’ve come across.
Really the key things are ensuring that the upfront discovery is accurate, that the testing is complete, and that we’ve also got the support that we need from the customer or whoever owns the data and the applications that are involved.
So, in this instance, with GroupBC, Paul’s technical understanding of the applications, which in themselves are quite complex, was an important part of the process. And we leaned on them heavily from an application testing perspective whilst they lead on us from their migration data testing perspective.
Paul Robinson, Systems Manager, GroupBC:
Having migrated our services to Secura, we’ve experienced a reliable system. Maintenance activity is going on in the background that we haven’t had to worry about and performance that was improved over our previous environment, and more control over bringing up and down new services as and when we require.
The opportunity for increased automation, and generally, just a better working environment for what we need to provide as a service provider. So going forwards, we expect to expand our presence on the Secura VPC platform.
We’re adding new clients all the time, adding additional services, and so our clients are always adding more content to our systems. They’re growing massively every day.
Virtual Private Cloud
The Virtual Private Cloud is inherently scalable and secure by design, providing the perfect foundation to support the development and delivery of even the most complex SaaS applications.
Security
GroupBC’s VPC platform is secure by design and hosted in state-of-the-art, fully accredited data centre facilities.
Secura worked with GroupBC on a suitable migration plan to accommodate their data requirements and ensure minimum disruption to their customers during migration.
The inherent scalability of the VPC gives GroupBC the ability to scale their resources up and down as and when they require them.
The Virtual Private cloud is highly available, providing reliable and guaranteed performance to ensure GroupBC’s global customers can access their software solutions 24/7.
