Very good connection with the Ultimo architecture
The Azure ecosystem is a good fit for the existing Ultimo software architecture, and offers many functionalities. Think of Power BI dashboarding in the Ultimo application, whilst also offering things like authentication and authorisation that ensure an even safer environment. Azure also offers plenty in terms of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT and Augmented Reality to take the Ultimo application to the next level.
Security
Annually, Microsoft invests 1 billion euros into security, for example by employing 3500 cyber security experts.[1] The Azure platform meets over 90 compliance certificates, including ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and the GDPR.
In addition to the built-in security in the Azure platform, Ultimo commissions a security assessment of the software and infrastructure by an external party every year. The latest assessment was carried out by Computest: ”The infrastructure and web application of Ultimo are of an excellent security level. The exposed services use up-to date software and no publicly known vulnerabilities were found in the used software. In addition to this, the systems in scope for the platform use a secure configuration.’ The results of the assessment can be requested.
Continuity guaranteed
Applying container architecture releases a higher availability of the Ultimo application. The software runs in these containers and can automatically restore in case a problem occurs. The data and environments are backed up to another Azure datacentre in near real time. This also guarantees the continuity in the unlikely case that an entire datacentre is unavailable.
Continuous Delivery
With regards to data, we can say that every customer has their own database. We took making the Ultimo software architecture suitable for Azure, as an opportunity to start releasing the software more frequently. The term for this in Continuous Delivery. This means that we automatically update all Ultimo environments to the latest version every week or more often. This allows us to make new functionality as well as bug and security fixes available for all environments quickly. This has considerably decreased the time-to-market of new functionalities.
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/trusted-cloud/)
