Kahua turns to Sungard AS for security and availability best practices

A small IT staff and stringent security requirements

With a small IT staff handling all customer data and the security requirements, Kahua needs a strong managed services provider whose IT professionals can serve effectively as an extension of Kahua’s team. Partnering with Sungard AS, Kahua provides its highly complex Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering to its customers with a high level of security and availability.

Security is critical and Sungard AS delivers broad expertise – including proactive warnings of cybersecurity issues they’re detecting elsewhere – as well as other enhanced services essential to Kahua.

Its co-founders, who have started and sold several other technology-based companies, had regrettable experiences with technology partners in the past. Frequent hacking attempts, unresponsive customer service and requests unfulfilled for days or weeks are just a few examples.

Close collaboration leads to a successful outcome

In the summer of 2013, Kahua began looking for a robust hosting partner, with a vetting process that took six months. “We needed a high-quality colocation vendor,” says CEO and co-founder Scott Unger.

Kahua turned to Sungard AS for managed hosting services in a colocation environment. In addition to colocation, Kahua executives recognised the additional value that Sungard AS could provide for availability and security. Kahua expects security compliance to continue to become increasingly important as it expands the business into government and healthcare markets. PCI compliance is also critical with credit card information as part of its operations.

“The value Sungard AS brings us for security and availability best practices is unrivalled,” says Unger. Sungard AS also offers the international data centre presence that Kahua sought based on plans to expand its platform globally.

Kahua appreciates the close communication that Sungard AS delivers. “We feel very involved. During the data centre build out, they shared the internal documents that their engineers used,” recalls Jeff Albertine, Network Administration Director. “They said, ‘Come join us; see the team.’ We truly work in partnership.”

We needed a high-quality colocation vendor.

CEO and co-founder, Kahua, Inc.

The value Sungard AS brings us for security and availability best practices is unrivalled.

CEO and co-founder, Kahua, Inc

A smooth migration and state-of-the art security protections

Kahua’s PaaS cloud offering recently went live in the new Sungard AS hosted environment. The migration went so smoothly that Albertine and his team received no tech support calls from customers. “We called our own tech support number to make sure it was working,” he says.

One recent Friday at 5 p.m., Kahua officials realised they quickly needed extra bandwidth to serve customer demand, going beyond Kahua’s existing contract with Sungard AS. “Our service delivery contact said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll make it happen now,’” notes Albertine. “With our previous vendor, we would have had to put in an order and wait days.”

Sungard AS furnishes state-of-the-art security protections, including Alert Logic* advanced security tools with 24/7 security monitoring, which can identify malicious behaviour and questionable network patterns originating both inside and outside Kahua’s network and collects and archives log data relevant to its security, among other services.