Cutting Cloud application response time

Zeta Compliance Technologies provides services to organisations with large estates, including educational establishments, high street shops, power stations and healthcare institutions. Zeta’s solutions make it possible for these organisations to carry out equipment inspections, risk assessments and other safety checks using barcode scanners linked with its web-based application, ZetaSafe, which collects data online and stores it securely in a database. This simple practice brings a high level of automation to what was once a very time and labour intensive process.

Each day, ZetaSafe processes extremely large amounts of sensitive data for compliance purposes and, as such, needs to be supported by a high performance, secure cloud infrastructure. Having experienced performance and reliability issues with previous hosting providers, Zeta has moved its hosting to FireHost’s secure cloud infrastructure. FireHost was tasked with providing its Intelligent Security Model with the highest performance specifications. Availability is vital for Zeta too; with all end user client data hosted online, uptime is essential for this SaaS company’s operations. Zeta’s customers often process thousands of separate tasks per day with ZetaSafe, and many typically synchronise data at the same time each week, potentially causing bottlenecks.

“The performance and speed of FireHost’s service is impressive,” said Chris Wiles, Zeta Compliance Technologies’ CTO. “Average load times for some of our applications are well over ten times faster than with our previous cloud service provider. At Zeta Compliance, we deal with huge amounts of data on a day-to-day basis from clients with the most stringent demands. We see massive spikes in traffic levels and are dependent on being able to maintain optimal functionality even during these busy periods. FireHost’s infrastructure has fully supported this aspect of our business.”

Because Zeta’s business is also rapidly expanding, it was vital that it chose a cloud hosting provider with both the infrastructure capacity and technical expertise to support the business through this growth. Where other cloud providers may offer very little in this way of support, FireHost’s highly trained staff provided substantial assistance during Zeta’s initial set-up, which included web and system architecture guidance.

“Zeta was unhappy with the performance of its previous hosting providers, so it was necessary to ensure gains in this area,” said Todd Gleason, director of technology for FireHost. “At FireHost, we see performance as a top priority and an area where we separate ourselves from commodity cloud providers. Our overall server performance, memory speed, processor speed and storage speed have been independently benchmarked against the competition, which we consistently outperform. Companies like Zeta are able to do more, do it faster and do it more reliably with our services, enabling them to quickly see business improvements from their cloud operations.”

*Zeta’s own benchmark identified a 750 percent reduction in response time after the move to FireHost. This change was a combination of software updates and FireHost’s secure infrastructure optimized for performance.
Previous average: 4,500 milliseconds
Average while hosting with FireHost: 600 milliseconds