Surafusion is set to scale and take on more clients. However, while a company’s client base should change, its reliability should not. As a company that provides data reconciliation and reporting for large retailers and their franchisees and vendors, reliability is paramount. Surafusion provides a modern, enterprise-class, fully web-based reconciliation platform to its clients. It wanted to ensure customer satisfaction, reliability, data security and compliance as it grows. It reached out to Synthesis Software Technologies, an innovative software development and consulting company, and it began its journey, ensuring its platform could manage all of the above and more as it scaled.
Challenge
Surafusion needed to ensure platform reliability, proactive monitoring and best-of-breed security, and compliance because of the nature of its confidential data. However, the Surafusion team did not have the specific knowledge required to manage its Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and wanted to rather invest its time in what it does best – reconciliation.
Solution
Surafusion partnered with Synthesis as its managed service provider (MSP) to oversee its platform. Synthesis began by optimising Surafusion’s environment to meet its requirements. The software company strategically upgraded and improved what was already in place, eliminated what was unnecessary (reducing costs), and added what was missing – creating the optimum environment for Surafusion to operate efficiently and effectively.
“It has been great partnership,” says Surafusion’s Owner, Owen Morgan, “and the professionalism has helped me focus on growing my business while knowing the environment is being well managed. ” The solution included incident management, security and compliance monitoring, architectural guidance, configuration and capacity management, threat management, and governance controls.
Upgrades & Improvements:
The platform could not afford downtime, so backups and disaster recovery (DR) were imperative. “As we started, we assessed the platform against AWS best practices and made immediate improvements,” explains Synthesis Service Manager, Rodney Ellis, “There needed to be more backups in place, so we implemented local SQL backups as well as AWS managed backups.”
Synthesis hardened the environment through DR testing. The team tests the implemented backups to ensure that they can restore and recover from them in case of data corruption or catastrophic failure. This creates reliability so the platform does not go down in case of unforeseen circumstances.
“We also upgraded all the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to the latest versions to make sure that they conform to best practices,” says Ellis.
Eliminations:
“Not only did we look to upgrade what was in place,” explains Ellis, “but we looked to remove any unused services.” An example of this is one of the ways the team optimised costs: “We turn off their servers at night when nobody is using them and then turn them back on in the morning. This saves costs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and all the other charged for services as we get charged for what we use and for how long we use it. AWS allows for this type of flexibility.”
Additions:
The solution implemented also allows Surafusion to have proactive monitoring of its environment where full-stack (all-in-one) monitoring has been implemented. This allows for up time, incident management and alerts of potential issues before they occur.
Additionally, security and compliance best practises and threat management (for internal and external risks) were implemented.
Results
Surafusion now has peace of mind that there is always someone looking after its platform. Its environment conforms to best practises, is secure and is up and stable regardless of the number of clients using it. The company can expand with ease.
“The Synthesis team has constantly been looking at making improvements to make the environment more cost effective, while at the same time managing the day-to-day monitoring. The ease of which is we are able to upscale the environment when needed and this has been a great benefit,” explains Morgan.
Since its partnership with Synthesis, Surafusion has had zero infrastructure issues and a 15% cost saving from January 2021 to April 2021. The reconciliation company has been set up for success and it can do what it does best – serve its clients.
