sanctions.io now with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%
After focusing on building our version 1.0 of sanctions.io we soon learned that our customers need more than just a functioning product. 'Enterprise Readyness' was our next challenge.
Being a startup our focus first was on building the base product itself and making sure that we live up to our own and of course to our customer's expectations.
So our first step was to build our Sanctions database covering the most important sanctions lists accessible via a reliable API.
Once we covered that, we focused on adding our new PEP list offering. Something that kept us on our toes for months, not only from a technical perspective but we also needed to find a reliable partner who was able to deliver high quality PEP data. (Something that turned out not to be easy at all.)
Finally we had what we considered 'Version 1.0' of our product, a platform to provide high quality, reliable and affordable data for any KYC (Know your customer) and AML (Anti-money laundering) screening process.
The great thing was that we soon received many more inquiries, especially from larger and/or more risk exposed organizations. Customers told us they liked the product, API works great but what about the 'nines' in our uptime? "What uptime commitment do you guys have?"
As I mentioned, our focus was on building the product and to be honest we neglected a bit the infrastructure which was running on one test server and only one production server so far. Clearly not something you would call 'high availability', so we decided to focus in the next couple of sprints on making our infrastructure 'Enterprise Ready'.
sanctions.io now with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%
After a couple of weeks of hard work (thanks to our awesome dev team around our CTO Hector) we finally are super happy, relieved and proud... to announce that sanctions.io now does guarantee an uptime of 99.99%!
Besides our test server we now have three production servers that are managed by an intelligent load balancing process and hosted on AWS.
Besides the technical infrastructure we also redesigned our internal development, testing and maintenance processes in order to make us also as an organization 'Enterprise Ready'.
Next steps
Now we are turning our focus back to product features and we can say we are working on quite some great stuff - but this is something for a next blog post. Stay tuned :)
Photo by Finn Hackshaw on Unsplash
