5 years ago
The importance of scalability, security and recovery...
Wayne Harris
A software-as-a-service solution isn’t just about platform functionality or usability, it’s also about being able to deliver a product that focuses on performance, security and scalability.
Performance can often be overlooked and lead to poor usability as content and downloads can become slow to access and load. Scalability issues mean that there are often caps imposed on storage and it doesn’t allow your brand management platform to grow as your business does. These platforms are also about protecting your brand, ensuring your valuable assets are held securely is business critical.
A robust, responsive and secure brand management solution should focus on the following 6 key components:
Advanced Security
Technology, hosting and processes should conform to the highest levels of modern security. Code should be regularly checked, use high levels of encryption and mitigate against the OWASP top 10 threats. Hosting solutions should be carefully monitored and configured to minimise security risks. Data security processes should be modelled around ISO27001 to ensure compliance and other testing tools such as Cyber Essentials can be used to check and validate the security setup.
Infinite Scalability
The latest cloud environments allow for on demand scalability meaning that your technology solution should never suffer from performance or capacity issues.
Site Monitoring
Both code and infrastructure can be proactively monitored meaning bugs and issues can be rectified before any negative effect on usability to ensure maximum uptime and user satisfaction.
Backups
Ensuring your data is backed up is essential and business critical. Data should be backed up to at least 2 different locations regularly to mitigate the risks of data loss. These backups should take place at least once a day and frequently changing data should be backed up hourly. This aids in the disaster recovery process and minimises any disruption to the service.
Disaster recovery
Careful steps are taken to minimise the risk of a disaster recovery situation, but often there is no way of preventing this. If it does happen the process should be in place to react swiftly and recover the platform and the data within an acceptable timeframe to limit any negative effect to your business.
Support & SLAs
The SAAS platform and it’s processes should all be wrapped up by a proactive support service to ensure there is always someone to talk to. This service should be measured regularly using SLAs and KPIs to ensure it’s consistent and effective.
In summary, if you are looking to purchase or have an existing brand management solution check to make sure that it covers the 6 points above.
At Brand iQ we pride ourselves on using scalable cloud computing providers such as Digital Ocean and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure we offer a high availability solution that is reliable, cost-effective and scalable. We take security very seriously and conform to both ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials security standards. We operate a dedicated and experienced support service to our clients’ to ensure they get the best from the platform and ensure all of our backup and disaster recovery processes our thorough and rigorously tested to give you piece of mind.
