It’s been two weeks since we hosted our fraud management solution in the cloud. It is purely for demo purposes, and the feedback so far has been positive. I thought I should share with you some of the thought processes that went into hosting the solution in the first place.
We announced a free trial offer to our clients to give them the assurance that our solution works, and that the data they would see through the eye of our software would be theirs. We realised, pretty early on, that the slides, the screenshots and the conference calls do help, but nothing like the real thing; nothing like letting our users try it out. It will cut out all the sales jargon, however unintended, and let them decide for themselves.
Given this context, we set about finding a hosting partner who could help us host our software to let our clients access our demo online. After a few web chats, emails and phone calls, we eventually settled for Amazon. Note that majority of the service providers that we had discussions with adequately met our requirement but we couldn’t digest the cost straight away as our trial was free.
Having been super easy to deploy our software on Amazon, it was also the most cost effective solution; we pay for what we use. Besides, it has been rock solid since we hosted with no technical glitches or issues. We didn’t need a lot of help from the Amazon geeks, so we are not entirely sure about how that would have gone as there are a lot of literature on the web about competing cloud providers and what sets them apart (technical support being the main differentiators). We were worried about the speed of our application over the internet and shared cloud resources, but the feedback from our clients so far has been positive.
Of course, offering this service in a production environment would be a completely different kettle of fish, but the complexities of getting our solution in the cloud at least are understood (to an extent) through this trial. Watch this space as we continue to experiment with this service and share with you our technical knowledge and lessons learned (and learning) from this great experience.
