Tactick

Tactick Scales 10x with Cyso Cloud: a success story

When Tactick, a leading Zoho implementation partner, needed to scale their integration platform 'SyncCentral', they turned to Cyso Cloud (Fuga Cloud at that time). Within 18 months, Tactick increased their monthly processing activity by over 10 times, all while maintaining strict data sovereignty and GDPR compliance. 'The combination of the certifications of Cyso and the server location gives us a great proposition towards our customers,' says Diederick Waverijn, manager of software development at Tactick.

About Tactick

Tactick has been for many years the leading Zoho implementation and support partner in the Benelux. We assist our customers in every aspect of transforming their current operations into streamlined, cloud based processes. This transformation is backed by our in-depth technical knowledge of the Zoho products and services and the customisation services we are able to provide. We truly believe that we do not have just paying customers but work together as partners to achieve great results.

What is unique about the services of Tactick?

We offer inhouse in-depth knowledge, technical assistance, customisation like portals and integration services. By not relying on third parties for knowledge or customisation we are able to provide a one-stop solution service to our customers.

Why is it important for you to work with a European cloud?

As part of our mission to be a trustworthy partner to our customers we believe that their data should be handled with the greatest care. As part of our integration service we handle a lot of sensitive data which we want to keep as local as possible.

Are Data Sovereignty, Data Portability and GDPR important for your business?

We believe that having control over your own data is a key aspect in the current digital landscape. Based on these principles and corresponding regulations like GDPR we are always looking for new opportunities to be transparent to our customers about their data and ways of giving them more control of their data.

The Product

Can you tell us what solution Tactick provides and who your customers are?

As part of our services we offer an integration platform “SyncCentral” which lets our customers integrate their different platforms. The scope and complexity of these integrations differ between customers, from scheduled backups to financial data and from shopping data like orders from webshops to customer data in CRM and Marketing applications.

Our customers are coming from a wide variety of industries. These include Healthcare, Real Estate, Publishing, Automotive, Retailers and IT, E-learning providers and more.

How do you experience the reliability and uptime of our cloud infrastructure for your implementations?

We have a great experience with the Cyso Cloud platform, especially since the hardware upgrades done this year.

Which aspects of our security measures do you find most valuable?

We have a few security measures or options we love. The first one is to have the rotating kubeconfig with an option to generate time-limited access from the dashboard. This prevents fixed tokens or other uncontrolled access and we can share the requested access only when needed and for a limited time period.

A second valuable security aspect of the Cyso Cloud services are the (ISO) certifications which not only are valuable for providing proof to us but also to our customers that we are handling their data with care.

To what extent do our compliance and data location options help you meet the requirements of your diverse customer base?

Some of our customers demand data to be processed locally, not only within the EU but also within the Netherlands. The combination of the certifications of Cyso Cloud and the server location gives us a great proposition towards our customers.

To what extent does our scalability meet the growing needs of your customer base?

With the managed Kubernetes, network and load balancer options we have grown our monthly processing activity over 10 times times since we started using Cyso Cloud in 2023. Aside from the normal processing activities we are also able to handle large bulk operations smoothly, a large part of all this is possible due to the scalability of the Cyso Cloud platform.

How did you end up at Cyso Cloud?

Previously we were managing our own server but due to the growing activity and regulatory needs from our customers we needed a solution which would be able to scale with our needs and also meet the other regulatory requirements and certifications.
The key things we considered while evaluating the different services were:

The scalability options in the form of Kubernetes
Managed services, as we did not want to have to worry any longer about server maintenance
EU located or if possible in the Netherlands
Certifications with a minimum of ISO27001
Reasonable priced with the option for flexible upgrades

What solutions did you evaluate before choosing Cyso Cloud?

We evaluated the main European cloud providers like OVH, Scaleway and Elastx and the large three US based cloud providers AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Part of this evaluation was the option to go to a serverless structure like AWS Lambda.

As we had decided to focus on data control, local (at least within EU) data processing and data sovereignty the US based cloud providers were quickly out of scope. During the remaining evaluation we found Cyso Cloud which, after careful evalution and great support from Cyso Cloud during this evalution phase, met all our requirements and was based in the Netherlands (an additional bonus which came later in as an advantage in contractual requirements with our customers).

How do you compare our services with other cloud providers you may have experience with?

We have seen the service and platform grow, from a stable no-nonsense platform to something which we now believe is a competitive and great platform to use.
A special note for the support team is also required, as they always have been very helpful for investigating issues and providing solutions (even if it turned out to be not an issue on the Cyso Cloud end but rather an issue in our integration service).

What are your thoughts on the cost-effectiveness of our services compared to your previous or alternative hosting solutions?

The Cyso Cloud solution is, especially with the new pricing options, a competitive option. Considering all the advantages like based in the Netherlands, the support team and platform capabilities it is for us a great alternative to the major competitors like Azure or AWS.

Implementation

What were the planning and steps during the implementation?

As we moved from a self managed server (without Kubernetes) to a managed Kubernetes environment, load balancers and object storage we did not only have to adopt the new platform but also redesign our complete integration solution. To take advantage of these new capabilities we first rebuilded our complete solution and ran it for a few months side-by-side with our exisiting server. After this testing period we moved the configuration to a production cluster and started migrating our customers to this new platform.

How do you experience the communication from our team when planning and executing upgrades or migrations?

The communication regarding upgrades or migrations is great and is always done upfront with more than enough time to take any preventive measures (if any are necessary but in most cases they are not).

How helpful was the online documentation?

The online documentation has been improving over time and currently covers all major topics for implementing. A point for improvement is providing direct links to help documentation from inside the dashboard.

To what extent do our monitoring and management tools assist you in optimising your implementations?

We have made use of the provided monitoring and management tools. For investigating issues the ability to view detailed cluster and pod logs, including network usage provides a lot of insight in what is happening inside the Kubernetes clusters.The monitoring provided by Fuga is a nice addition to our own monitoring tools.

How do you rate our support in resolving technical issues or queries?

The support has been great, quickly responding and in some cases did go beyond expectation providing solutions or pointing to issues or bottlenecks we did not discover ourselves.

How do you experience the performance of our infrastructure, especially during peak loads?

The performance overall was good, but after the latest hardware upgrade has improved to great.

How do you experience the flexibility of our cloud solutions?

The cloud solution does offer us the flexibility we need in terms of compute and storage options and the scalability of the EMK clusters. We have not run into any situation where the Fuga Cloud resources were the bottleneck without the ability to scale.

What do you like about Fuga Cloud?

For us the support team is the overall winner (as pointed out above), but also the platform innovations and growth we have seen during our time with Fuga gives us the feeling we made the right choice.

What additional services or features would you like to see in our offering to better support your services?

We would love to explore a ‘database as a service’ option.

What have been the achievements since you started using Fuga Cloud?

We have been welcoming a growing customer base with in some cases heavy workloads. Since our start at Fuga we have seen the monthly processing activities grow by more then 10 times within 18 months.

Next steps

What are the next steps for Tactick?

Currently we are redesigning parts of our integration solution. Based on all the Kubernetes experience we now have and new insights we are working on a new version which will incorporate more Fuga platform (and Kubernetes) features that will help us scale up our services hassle free in the future. In addition we will also open up the solution for customers to configure their integrations, whereas now only Tactick employees are able to configure them.
This redesign also incorporates features which will help with Tactick expanding internationally and offering the integration solutions to more and international customers.

How do you plan to grow with Fuga Cloud?

In the coming years we expect to rely more and more on the scaling capabilities of the Fuga Kubernetes platform and related services as storage and load balancing. We see the ability to scale and expand within the EU, as part of our mission, as a key feature and will happily use the new data centres or services of Fuga when needed.

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