CEO’s Corner
Rhys David
Reading Time – 3 Minutes
Updated 13 August 2018 – Originally Published on Compare The Cloud – 25 September, 2017
Credas provides a wide range of products and services that enable any business to onboard and verify people quickly, accurately and affordably via a mobile app.
Often, the way in which many businesses verify their employees, partners or clients ID can be slow and expensive, exposed to unnecessary risk and as a result open to inaccuracies. Credas can reduce the exposure to risk in a simple and flexible way ensuring commercial benefit and time-saving solutions. Our Know Your Customer, Anti-money laundering, Right to Work, Right to Rent and Anti-slavery products ensure accurate and transparent checks.
Offering a fresh perspective in a mature market, we quickly realised being cloud-based was the only viable option to satisfy the need for flexibility, security, scalability and cost management. There are a lot of buzzwords there, none of them new and 10 or 15 years ago the solutions to those hurdles were very different and certainly not as interconnected in the way they are today.
Back then on-premise and data centre solutions would have been required and that instantly increases cost, complexity and the number of moving parts within an operation.
Data is very much the oil of the 21st century and is a mission-critical asset to all businesses. The need to store it securely while making it easily accessible is non-negotiable, but also a delicate balance to find.
With new data regulations coming into play next year, our clients are comfortable knowing their data is held within a globally renowned and trusted cloud platform and not on a server underneath a desk.
Credas captures sensitive information, so knowing the data is being looked after is incredibly important to us, and our clients and ultimately ensures we build trust and confidence as a business. Security is high on our agenda and a key selling point for Credas, and it’s why we run multiple penetration tests each year to ensure our defences are secure and that we keep up-to-date with the various techniques used by cybercriminals.
From a technology point of view, we combine facial and ID recognition with a best-in-class data platform, well-designed, user-friendly applications and seamless integration options. All of this has enabled us to provide our core verification engine as a stand-alone component, meaning we can integrate easily with existing systems our clients may have in real-time using various methods, such as APIs. Imagine the difficulty in achieving this simple task if we were not cloud-based.
Operationally there are also multiple benefits to being cloud-based that free us up to do what we do best (and that isn’t patching servers in our server room):
- Capital-expenditure that often comes with running your own IT is eliminated because we use a subscription-based model, which is great for cash flow too. This enables us to run accurate financial forecasts so we can plan our development work carefully and manage the spend.
- Risk management is a key area for all businesses but seldom at the top of the list for smaller companies. When things go wrong, it’s important to have a disaster recovery plan in place that minimises any impact on the running of the business. Being cloud-based makes this much more manageable and achievable.
- Scalability and performance are very important to us and we can easily grow, shrink or repurpose our eco-system as per business demand and react very quickly to various conditions.
- The speed of delivery is another critical component in a digital world, and as feedback is vital to improve our products we need a platform and key processes in place that enables us to execute, change and explore opportunities quickly. Using a continuous delivery pipeline in our cloud environment, we can progress changes rapidly through automated functional and performance test suites, and implement those changes to our live environment reliably and with no downtime. This speed of delivery is vital in allowing our products to evolve and adapt quickly based on our clients’ needs while ensuring high-performance and availability of our systems at all times. Being cloud-based has made this process significantly slicker and more cost-effective than conventional alternatives by allowing us to spin up servers, scale our build agents on-demand and simulate load for automated performance and stress testing.
There are hundreds of valid points to highlight about using the cloud, but for Credas being cloud-based has enabled us to realise our potential quickly whilst keeping expenditure low which has been vital to realise our business growth plans.
