Coresystems Utilizes Red Hat Solutions To Offer Secure Access To Erp Data In The Cloud

Founded in 2002 in Windisch, Switzerland, coresystems AG is today’s leading global provider of standardized SAP solutions for small and medium enterprises. Coresystems has more than 5,000 customers and 45,000 users. The company is a certified SAP GOLD Partner (SSP) and a Microsoft ISV Silver Partner. Its customers include small and medium-sized businesses as well as large corporations from a wide range of industries. The coresystems innovative coresuite solutions provide seamless end-to-end support for business processes by accessing local information available in the ERP environment and creating value-added applications in the cloud that can be used by mobile devices such as iPhones. Coresystems currently employs more than 60 people and has offices in London, New York, and Shanghai, and maintains support centers in Ireland and Copenhagen. Coresuite solutions are also distributed internationally by more than 350 qualified SAP partners.

Coresystems’ new coresuite mobile solution is designed to provide access to data from different ERP systems via mobile devices using cloud computing. The solution exports data created by the customer and makes it available to employees on-the-go using a web service, regardless of the type of equipment. The web service provided by coresuite mobile communicates easily with numerous mobile devices, including iPads, iPhones, Blackberry phones, and Windows smartphones. The service also serves Silverlight clients, providing native applications with improved usability and performance.

While coresystems is a successful software development company, it is not in the business of running datacenters. The company quickly realized that it could not properly operate the infrastructure required for its coresuite mobile product. “We did briefly think about hosting the servers required for the web interface ourselves. But a quick look at the cost made it immediately clear that this would not make good business sense. The administrative budget alone is more than several times the cost of the Amazon server instances including all necessary licenses,” said Thierry Rietsch, coresuite.com lead architect, coresystems.

Therefore, the company decided to have its servers hosted by a cloud provider, and selected Amazon EC2. One of the main reasons for selecting Amazon was because the company operates datacenters across the planet, enabling coresystems to offer global availability
to its customers. “For some of our customers, it is essential that their data doesn’t leave a certain region. Thanks to Amazon’s global presence, we can easily meet this requirement,” said Rietsch.

In addition to its flexibility and low cost benefits, Amazon EC2 offered a further benefit — as a Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider, Amazon offers Red Hat software on its EC2 cloud. With this, Amazon provides pre-configured images with Red Hat Enterprise Linux that can be customized by coresystems for use with coresuite mobile.

For coresystems, it was clear from the beginning that the cloud service should be based on Linux. “We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the company’s comprehensive product portfolio. And because our developers wanted a one-stop solution for everything from the server operating system to the application server, we selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,”said Rietsch. This decision was made even easier by the fact that the Red Hat solutions portfolio is considerably more cost-efficient than the software stacks offered by competitors.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform also provides a number of technical advantages. “JBoss Enterprise Application Platform makes development really easy for us,” said Rietsch. “Thanks to JBoss Hibernate Framework, we can continue to work in the familiar Java environment rather than dealing with the PostgreSQL database language. JBoss Hibernate Framework takes care of translating between the software components.”

Databases are critical to the cloud platform. Instead of creating a large database for storing customer information, the system creates a separate database for each customer. “Separate databases provide serious speed benefits, allowing us to maximize a comparatively simple and therefore cost-efficient infrastructure,” said Rietsch. The entire cloud platform behind coresuite mobile is currently based on only ten servers rented from Amazon.

Cloud specialists from Red Hat provided support during the development phase, passing their experience with cloud applications and designing cloud systems onto coresystems, which now is a Red Hat Advanced ISV Partner. “Collaboration with Red Hat was excellent, and we feel very confident with its support,” said Rietsch.

With Red Hat’s support, it took a mere nine months to turn an idea into a product that could be used in production, despite this project being coresuite’s first cloud project.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a wealth of securityenhancing features to developers and ultimately to the users of the cloud service. “From the outset, security was a key component of the coresuite mobile approach,” said Rietsch. “For example, we use the hard disk encryption option, which Red Hat helped us to implement, that is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” Full Disk Encryption (FDE) ensures that even if a hard disk is stolen from one of Amazon’s datacenters, no coresystems customer data falls into the wrong hands.

Coresystems has also introduced strict rules for its own team to safeguard customer information. For example, developers always work on the cloud platform in teams of two in order to double-check each other’s work. Additionally, internal log files track all changes in detail, allowing the company to check what was modified when and by whom.

“ Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in the cloud allow us to create a platform that can easily handle thousands of users at a very low cost and with little effort.” – Thierry Rietsch, coresuite.com Lead Architect at coresystems

Of course, the actual data transfers are also protected. SSL (secure socket layer) is used for data exchange between the ERP connector and the cloud service, as well as between the cloud and the clients installed on the mobile devices.

The ten Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers can easily handle the workload generated by the 300 coresuite mobile customers. Four months after the start of the project, the combination of Amazon hosting, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to deliver strong results. “We were able to create a platform that can easily handle thousands of users at a very low cost and with little effort,” said Rietsch.

After the positive experience of the first few months, coresystems is already thinking about expansion. “We want to add more servers to create a highly available system,” said Rietsch. “The new machines will run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in the future. And the server software will help us expand our infrastructure by providing maximum performance with integrated load-balancing functionality.” Coresystems’ long-term goal is to enable 200,000 users to access ERP data on-the-go by 2014.