Selima was founded in 1983 and provides clients with human resource, payroll and expense management as both a managed online service and as a series of speciality EnvoyWorld software packages.
Selima works with customers from all business sectors but has built particularly strong relationships with local authorities and larger organisations, which have come to rely heavily on Selima’s expertise and the industry leading applications they deliver.
Customer Quote
The guys at Sleek demonstrated an excellent understanding of what we wanted to achieve and their advice was invaluable. They know how to make technology meet real everyday business requirements in a cost effective manner. I am delighted we chose Sleek as our provider and would recommend them without hesitation.
Wayne Blakemore, Selima Managing Director
THE ENVOYWORLD SUITE
The EnvoyWorld suite of applications has been developed by Selima to provide organisations with a complete, simple to use, human resource ecosystem.
It grants access at three levels within an organisation, allowing direct management and control of the systems by HR and payroll, a data access and reporting layer to the management team and convenient individual employee access to their own expense records via their work desktop.
The EnvoyWorld suite is modular, allowing organisations to use the whole system or just those applications that are relevant to their business.
ENVOYWORLD DELIVERED AS A SERVICE
Taking full advantage of cloud computing technologies, Selima delivers the EnvoyWorld system directly into organisations as a service, via the cloud.Providing secure hosting and access for the applications as well as maintaining strict customer SLA agreements for availability is therefore a significant priority for Selima, particularly as this form of application delivery becomes more and more popular and their user base grows, increasing the demands on their systems.
THE CHALLENGE
Selima required two new purpose built Private Cloud platforms to house their client facing applications and a high-availability disaster recovery platform.
A high-performance and flexible cloud infrastructure was required to ensure a smooth, reliable platform for Selima’s customers and to make future expansion of the service simple and cost effective. The platform had to accommodate the significant future growth forecast by the new management team.
Selima and their clients also needed to be able to access the cloud platform securely and with no performance issues via VPN connections. The ability to quickly and easily create these secure connections, their resilience, availability and bandwidth allocation, were therefore also important considerations.
Sleek also needed to manage the transfer of the whole system from the existing provider, without data loss or interruption, to its new home at Sleek.
THE SOLUTION
The Selima Private Cloud needed to offer a secure, fast, resilient, highly available and scalable system.
The infrastructure that Sleek proposed consisted of HA Clustered Cisco ASA Firewalls sitting in front of a series of powerful HP Proliant servers and NetApp SAN storage. The use of this kind of high quality hardware, the configuration and the industry leading VMware hypervisor across two Data Centres ensures a stable, fault tolerant and highly responsive platform.
As the second Private Cloud would handle the backup and recovery side of Selima’s setup, a more modest technological foot print was required. This needed a Cisco ASA Firewall and HP Proliant servers, linked again to NetApp SAN storage.
The Private Clouds could then be connected by VPN tunnels to both Selima, for administrative operations and to clients, to access their EnvoyWorld suite of applications.
Replication between the two private cloud platforms was required to ensure continuity of data in the event of failover from the primary to the secondary cloud platforms.
The highly flexible and scalable nature of this cloud setup allows Selima to quickly and simply add virtual machines on the platform for new client acquisitions and the platforms benefit from Sleeks highly connected and available BGP IP network.
THE RESULTS
The Sleek managed Private Clouds went live in April following the successful transfer of all the data from the previous cloud supplier, into the new platform.
Customer Quote
Sean Hannam, Selima Product DirectorThe high level of expertise and commitment of Sleek’s staff was evident in abundance when they assisted us in the migration from our previous cloud services provider to Sleek. They were able to resolve issues quickly and professionally.
These two new high-availability cloud platforms offer a superb base from which Selima can maintain its high service levels to the existing client base as well as allowing new client accounts and VPN connections to be provisioned with ease.
The flexibility of this virtual environment gives Selima the ability to introduce new systems and functionality into the Private Cloud network and the infrastructure is designed in such a way that additional capacity can be quickly and cost effectively added in the future as they expand their operations and require more power, capacity and storage.
Ryan McCarry, the Managing Director of Sleek said:
We were very pleased to be chosen by Selima to provide them with a Sleek solution and play our part in their continued success and growth. Selima are developing the delivery of their valuable SaaS product set in an innovative, exciting way and we are delighted to be involved in what is a showcase for the powerful benefits of cloud hosting and delivery.
