Discover Formpipe Cloud’s New Cloud Monitoring Platform with Usama Musthafa

Cloud document management has changed the game for banks across the globe. But transparency must take centre stage in these solutions. That’s why we’ve integrated a user-friendly cloud monitoring dashboard into Formpipe Cloud for our banking customers. At the helm of this project was Usama Musthafa, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Formpipe. We recently sat down with Usama to discuss his role on the project and explore what the new cloud monitoring platform means for our banking customers.

Usama Musthafa joined Formpipe in 2021 as an Infrastructure Engineer, responsible for infrastructure testing. However, it didn’t take him long to realise that his real interest lay in the development side of the business, specifically in Cloud Services. After taking up the role of Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Usama took on more responsibility for scrum and agile planning, championing continuous improvement and flexibility for Formpipe Cloud. His technical expertise and drive were central to moving our cloud monitoring solution out of the development phase and into the hands of our banking customers.

Keen to address the concerns of banking clients, Usama and the Cloud Services team took decisive action to add cloud monitoring functionality to Formpipe Cloud. “Early on, we lacked the tools to give our customers the insight they deserve into their cloud services. We now have real-time cloud monitoring capabilities, giving customers visibility into service status and helping us guarantee the server uptime promised in our Service Level Agreements (SLAs),” Usama said.

The cloud monitoring platform will give banks the visibility they need to ensure the uptime and availability they promise their own customers, reducing penalties and lost business due to downtime. Instead of worrying about whether cloud systems are operational, users can simply check the dashboard and feel instantly assured that everything is running as it should be.

The Importance of Constant Visibility

The cloud takes the hassle out of document management. However, without constant visibility, cloud platforms can pose challenges for users. Lack of visibility is a big pain point for banks in particular, especially when it impacts something as integral to operations as document management. 

Explaining how system availability affects banks, Usama said: “Before we launched this solution, our banking customers didn’t know if their cloud products were up or down. But they need to be assured that our system is available, as they’ve got documentation to produce and official procedures to follow.” As a result, banks need transparency into time-sensitive background processes that power core aspects of everyday operations, like document generation, delivery and archiving.

Know Your Cloud, Inside Out

The cloud monitoring solution we’ve launched is a proactive information hub for customers relying on Formpipe Cloud. “Our cloud monitoring solution is an easier way to let customers know if there is an issue. It’s the first place they can go to see if services are down,” Usama explained. 

“If we’re doing some planned maintenance or making updates to improve our cloud offerings, customers can see status messages in their dashboard, letting them know about planned downtime,” he added. Customers no longer need to send emails or phone the support team to check if their cloud environment is operational—they have cloud visibility right at their fingertips.

Security-First Design

The safety of your data is always our number one priority. That’s why we use secure access controls and an application gateway-based access method to protect all Formpipe Cloud data. During the cloud monitoring solution development phase, Usama and the Formpipe Cloud team considered security at every stage of the process, taking a zero-trust approach to keep customer data secure. 

Usama shed some light on the various security features that keep data safe from prying eyes: “Our cloud monitoring solution is encrypted and SSL certified to ensure data is secure at all times, meeting the strict standards financial institutions must adhere to. Each customer view is protected from other users, meaning their dashboard environment is completely isolated and secure.” Each banking customer gets their own private dashboard, letting them monitor their cloud environment securely without exposing data to others.

From Concept to Launch

Bringing the cloud monitoring tool to life required careful orchestration by the Formpipe Cloud team. Usama was instrumental in finding the right solution to satisfy clients' requirements and give them the transparency they need.

Discussing the journey from concept to launch, Usama said, “After the project was green-lighted, I looked into different tools that would allow us to provide our customers with an easy-to-use dashboard they could access whenever they liked to show them whether our services were up and running.”

The possibility of inaccurate alerts was a key concern for Usama, as he wanted to make sure the platform was always an asset to customers rather than a nuisance that sometimes cried wolf. “After finding the right solution, I spent some time setting it up to make sure it had a high degree of accuracy, for example, not showing customers false positives that would cause unnecessary alarm and eat away at the trust our customers have in Formpipe Cloud,” he said. After months of research and careful implementation, the cloud monitoring platform was launched, and the rest is history.

After a successful roll-out, feedback from banking customers using the cloud monitoring solution has been overwhelmingly positive. “Banking customers have been asking for cloud monitoring capability, and we’ve now delivered it to some of our banking industry users,” explained Usama. “They’re really enjoying using it.”

At the very end of our discussion, we put Usama on the spot, asking him if he could boil down the value of the cloud monitoring platform into just three words. His answer? “Visibility, reliability and security.”

Managing documents in the cloud is great, but who has the time to worry about running an enterprise-level software suite, including hosting, data security, backups, maintenance and upgrades?  Formpipe Cloud is changing banks’ document management for the better. 

Our cloud solution supports next-level document generation, delivery and archiving, allowing you to move away from clunky legacy systems and focus more on your core business. So, if you’re a Lasernet or Autoform DM banking customer looking to embrace smart document management, please don’t hesitate to talk to us about hosting via Formpipe Cloud or book a demo below.