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There are many reasons why a company can benefit from a Software as a Service solution.

The main ones are:

• Lack of specific internal skills to manage a business critical platform
• Scalability of the solution, which ensures better performance management
• Reduced time-to-value
• Reduction management time of any flaws or bugs
• Immediate availability of new features or services
• Reduced insertion costs
• Software always up to date

The Sourcing and Procurement processes performed on the IUNGO SaaS platform are by definition mission critical, which is why we are strongly committed to providing stable and safe products, applications and large-scale infrastructure.

The IUNGO SaaS infrastructure is designed to ensure optimal performance, scalability and high reliability worldwide, making the most of the distributed architecture and multi-level redundancy provided by our Cloud computing service providers.

Moreover, the choice of an architecture optimized for the Cloud guarantees the adoption of all the services provided for by the IUNGO Integration Service and of all the functionalities provided for in the product Roadmap.

THE APPROACH

In order to obtain a platform that guarantees maximum data confidentiality and excellent performance, a mixed architecture has been chosen:

SINGLE-TENANT
for services where an extremely high level of security and confidentiality is required, or for services that need to allow in-depth customizations to better meet customers’ needs

MULTI-TENANT
for services connecting multiple stakeholders or requiring extreme flexibility and speed to adapt to changes in processing requests

THE DEVOPS METHODOLOGY

In order to achieve the best results in terms of service availability, scalability and performance guaranteed by our Cloud architecture, we employ a range of DevOps practices, principles and tools.

DevOps is a set of practices combining Software Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) with the aim of speeding up the system development life cycle and enabling Continuous Delivery with high quality software releases.

DevOps is defined by four guiding principles, summarized in the CAMS acronym:

• Culture represented by human communication, technical processes, and tools
• Automation of processes
• Measurement of KPIs
• Sharing feedback, best practices and knowledge

which guide us in achieving the three key objectives:

• Infrastructure Automation
• Continuous Delivery
• Reliability Engineering

The DevOps we use at IUNGO S.p.A. include leading tools in the software development and IT services market.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE

Using the Infrastructure as Code paradigm makes it possible to manage virtual machines without having to manually configure and update individual hardware and software elements.

By using tools such as HashiCorp Terraform® and Puppet® and automated Build & Deploy procedures, we ensure repeatable and scalable infrastructure configuration so as to avoid operator errors.

The adoption of some specific tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, along with the cloud computing platform Google Cloud Platform guarantee an excellent service in terms of Service Availability, Scalability and Performance.

DOCKER
Docker is a containerization technology that offers the flexibility to create, deploy, copy and move containers from one server to another, thus optimizing apps for the cloud. Docker allows the individual components of a software system to be installed separately without having to stop the entire system.

KUBERNETES
Kubernetes is an open-source platform for the management of containerized workloads and services that eliminates many of the manual processes, making applications that reside in Docker containers scalable. This platform boasts a large and rapidly growing ecosystem. Services, support and tools are widely available in the Kubernetes world.

Kubernetes is a Google project adopting the best international best practices since 2014.

This type of approach ensures the optimal management of the following topics:

• Infrastructure abstraction | it allows developers to focus on applications 
• Automated Operations | it allows to automate daily operations
• Automated Rollouts and Rollbacks | when installing an update, it ensures that the system always remains in a consistent state. In case the update fails, it is able to restore the last configuration automatically.
• Load optimizing and balancing | automatic distribution of traffic across multiple containers and servers, so that the service remains stable, thus making it possible to automatically scale application processing capacity
• Service integrity monitoring and self-healing |automatic and constant integrity checks on services and applications performed in containers, ensuring maintenance, load balancing, upscaling or upgrading operations.
• Management of sensitive information and of configuration | separate management of application configurations and of architecture by implementing segregation of duties. Developers and IT operations work in different environments, thus avoiding the propagation of errors.

AVAILABILITY ZONES

The core of the Iungo SaaS architecture are the Availability Zones provided by Google Cloud Platform; this is the foundation of the strategy we have used to ensure continuity in customer operations.

Availability Zones ensure physical redundancy and make the infrastructure resilient, able to adapt to usage conditions in order to ensure the availability of services.

The data of our customers using IUNGO SaaS are replicated on at least two Availability Zones to ensure the shortest possible service recovery time in case of a serious issue in the primary area, even in the event of power outages, downtime of Internet connections, or natural disasters.

Thanks to the architecture distributed over multiple Availability Zones, most maintenance and upgrades are performed without downtime.

Each installation of IUNGO SaaS is constantly monitored by a monitoring system and supervised by the Customer Support department, which is alerted in case of failures, potentially problematic system status or performance degradation.

COSTS AND SERVICES

COSTS
From a financial point of view, the SaaS solution guarantees a lower cost of adopting the technology, which is scalable based on actual use.

SERVICES
IUNGO SAAS guarantees quicker times, in case of disruption, taking charge of tickets and the activation of new modules.

It is also possible to enter into more stringent Application Maintenance Service contracts in case of real need.

Check the solution offering or ask your contact person or contact us.