Technology and tools we use to work remotely

We use the following technology and tools to work remotely:

• Barracuda CloudGen Firewall VPN Service – We have been using Barracuda CloudGen firewall for over a over a year now. All the products that we promote to our clients need to pass internal testing. We have a fibre 1000 connection from TPG to our office premise. The Barracuda VPN service is very quick, stable and efficient. Our team uses Mac computers mainly but we also have Windows computers and Barracuda VPN client software is used. VPN provides a secure way for remote teams to connect and access the business network.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – We use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure for all our server requirements for SaaS (Software as a Service) products that we have developed. We have been using AWS since the S3 days. We also use it for hosting our Code and Package repositories. Most of the servers use Ubuntu and the servers are light weight. Recently we decided to use AWS RDS (Relational Database Service) for SaaS to off load some of the maintenance work. We also have many development and test environments on AWS and Azure. The great thing about the cloud for us is access to different geographic regions and pay based on use. It gives SMEs the power to scale with no upfront infrastructure costs. We use VPN to connect to the cloud and our cloud network is configured to allow only our VPN traffic for administration.
• Flair Bots – This is a business management software built by us. We use it to manage sales, service requests and projects. This also helps many of our clients to manage their on-site projects.
• Microsoft Teams – We use it for chat between team members, channels to organise the communication based on the department. It is also great for conferencing and screen sharing. Integration with Office 365 email is also handy.
• Microsoft SharePoint – This is our intranet platform. We use it to share documents and plan using group calendars.
• Atlassian Jira – For managing complex SaaS development projects.
• Xero – For accounting purposes.
• LivePlan – This is great for business owners and founders for planning and forecasting.
• Email – This technology hasn’t changed for a long time and is still required. Our SaaS product Flair Bots and others like Jira integrates with emails to organise communication. We try our best to limit the use of emails. We use Office 365 and Rackspace to manage our email hosting.