Overview

Simple Continuity were the pioneers in the Business Impact Analysis. Their SaaS offering RADAR based on a five-step framework, Recognize, Assign, Define, Analyse, and Report. Any size business could use this tool to understand the impact of any resource in their business.  

Client: Simple Continuity  
Industry: Security, Compliance 
Services: Business Continuity, Business Impact Analysis

Challenge

Simple Continuity had a great product in an area much needed for the Business Impact tool. They anticipated exponential growth immediately after the launch and they did not want to worry about analyzing the load at various times of the day or certain days of the week. They wanted to leverage the auto-scaling feature in the Microsoft Azure cloud so the application could scale based on load. According to Simple Continuity CTO “Startups are tricky. They face a series of challenges, the business side comes with their challenges that need to be anticipated, planned, and resolved on regular bases. But on the technical side, all the challenges need to be identified and baked in the solution from day one. Many startups fail because they collapse under their own weight. I know it’s hard to get the users on your new SaaS platform but once they start flowing, they can bring the environment down. The companies that survive make their environment elastic.”

Solution

Public clouds, Azure, AWS, Google, etc. allow building an application that can leverage cloud APIs to expand the environment. Elasticity can also be built with the environment. The challenge posed by Simple Continuity had a flip side and it could not be ignored. System expansion could be achieved but a small spike in user load could elevate the environment cost for the long term as well. So for this solution to work, it needed to be true elastic. It needed not just to scale up but scale down as well. Borders Solutions achieved it by scaling the storage vertically and the compute horizontally. We created the Service Oriented Architecture so leverage the cloud elasticity and created all the instances behind Application Load Balancers so that the expansion and contraction could be seamless behind common endpoints.

Results

Borders Solution architected their product with Service Oriented Architecture, with Angular as the front-end. Node.JS was used for the API layer and the persistence layer was implemented with Microsoft SQL Server. The environment was fully automated with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment tools like Github and Jenkins. It saved Simple Continuity the future headache and kept the compute load within sustainable limits. It also saves Simple Continuity money in the long run.