The company first introduced a hosted option for its aBILLity system in 2011, prior to this the system was available only as an on-premise solution. Its ‘Cloud Hosted Billing’ service proved extremely popular and Union Street now hosts aBILLity for over half of its reseller partners, with almost all new partners opting to use the service.
Managing Director, Tony Cook (pictured), cites increasing demand as a key driver behind Union Street’s choice of Microsoft Azure to power its hosted platform. He explains, “We wanted to ensure that our hosted environment could scale effortlessly without limit as more partners chose to use our Cloud Hosted Billing service. Azure provides powerful tools for monitoring applications and analysing traffic, giving us in-depth, real time insight into how our platform is performing. Thanks to Azure’s flexible network infrastructure, we’re able to instantly respond to increases in demand, proactively scaling up compute resource to manage capacity as required.
“We can now be certain that no matter how many partners choose to use our cloud hosted billing service, they will always have access to the resources they need to keep aBILLity running at peak performance.”
Cook continued, “Protecting data has never been more important, or more challenging, than it is today. As such we have built our platform from the ground up according to best practice for data security, delivering security levels comparable to those found in the financial sector.”
David McGrath, CTO for Union Street, was instrumental in developing and deploying the new hosted platform. Elaborating on its security features, David comments, “The platform features a traditional three tier network with web, application and database legs. Communication only ever crosses a single tier and each tenant has its own dedicated security group which controls database access, file system permissions and access to the aBILLity remote app. The platform will only accept secure connections and multi factor authentication is available for those clients that may need an added layer of security.”