35 Years of Lasernet: The Journey into the Cloud
For 35 years, Lasernet has formatted, printed, delivered and archived data for ERP and banking solutions. However, it’s only in the last decade that the cloud came into the picture. For the third instalment of the 35 Years of Lasernet series, we spoke to Dene Palmer, Head of Platform at Formpipe, about his instrumental role in the company’s journey into the cloud.
From Support Engineer to Head of Platform
A decade ago, the cloud was in its infancy. It was around this time that Dene joined EFS Technology, which was later acquired by Formpipe. He started his career as a Support Engineer, helping customers make the most of the company’s document management and archival system.
After a few months on the support team, Dene's many talents were recognised. He waved goodbye to support and took up the role of Technical Project Manager. In this role, Dene spent his time getting things working for customers, setting up new projects and meeting new customers around the world.
After several years on the delivery side, he pivoted into the cloud product world. Dene was influential in creating EFS’ SaaS offering, from the initial project conversations to being responsible for the delivery. His work didn’t go unnoticed. When EFS was acquired by Formpipe in 2020, Dene was given the opportunity to lead the company’s new cloud initiative as Head of Cloud Services for the private sector.
Fast-forward to today, and Dene is now Head of Platform, responsible for all the engineering, testing and other supporting teams that make Formpipe Cloud what it is today.
The birth of Formpipe Cloud
Dene brought Formpipe Cloud to life, leading a team to take Formpipe’s on-premise software offerings into the Azure cloud. “When Formpipe acquired EFS, they saw what I’d done and asked me if I wanted to form a cloud team,” he said. “I put a brand-new team together, doing similar to what I did at EFS, just on a much larger scale.”
In just four years, Formpipe Cloud transformed from an idea into a first-class SaaS platform for ERP and banking customers who have migrated to the cloud. “We take care of all the hosting, data management, backups, availability and redundancy,” Dene explained. “It almost acts like a customer’s IT team—all they have to do is use the product. They don’t have to worry about updates, patching, maintenance or anything like that. We take care of it all.” Formpipe Cloud allows you to concentrate on what’s most important to you—delivering solutions for your customers with our products.
High availability through redundancy and resiliency
Disaster recovery sits at the heart of Formpipe Cloud. Asked what the main benefits of the platform are, Dene said, “The redundancy and resiliency, particularly geo-redundancy. We use Microsoft Azure and its data centres to host our stuff. For banking customers, we would co-locate with the bank’s primary data centre. If it’s a European bank, we would host in a European data centre, but then also have a second instance of their cloud running in a second European data centre.”
If an outage occurs, the second data centre takes over, ensuring the system is always operational. It’s clear that proactivity has been a major priority for Dene and his Formpipe Cloud team from the very beginning. “We’ve got all kinds of scripts and routines looking for faults and spinning up the backup,” he said.
Take control of your data’s location
Another Formpipe Cloud priority is helping banking customers comply with data residency requirements. Formpipe Cloud helps financial institutions meet data residency requirements by using Microsoft Azure’s geography feature.
Financial institutions are faced with a web of complex legislation. “GDPR and the Schrems II ruling changed things for data residency,” Dene said. The 2020 European Court of Justice ruling had significant implications for businesses. Schrems II invalidated the Privacy Shield framework, which previously allowed companies to transfer EU personal data to the US while ensuring compliance with EU data protection regulations. However, the court found that Privacy Shield did not adequately protect EU citizens’ data from US government surveillance.
With Formpipe Cloud, banking customers can store their sensitive data in various countries across the globe. “We work with our customers and store their data where they want it to be,” Dene said. “Microsoft is bringing new data centres online all the time in places like the Middle East and Africa. New markets are opening up all the time.”
Proactive internal cloud monitoring
In the spirit of proactivity, the cloud team introduced a new internal cloud monitoring platform to give them a constant state of visibility into system operations. “Internally, the cloud team have access to a whole suite of dashboards that show them if something is wrong. We now have thousands of alerting rules in place, so if something goes wrong, it will ping an email off to the correct person,” Dene said. “It’s there for the cloud team primarily to be proactive and spot things that might need their attention.”
This proactive approach not only empowers our internal teams but also extends to our customers. “We’ve also recently rolled out a status page for some of our banking customers—this gives them a green light to see if their service is up or down. It also records data over time, so they can see how much uptime the system had.”
An ironclad security commitment
Security is a significant concern for financial institutions that want to transition to the cloud. Formpipe takes security very seriously—our teams within the Private Sector, including our Formpipe Cloud team, work to ISO 27001 standards to ensure the tight regulation of software, hardware, systems, processes, and services.
“We have our ISO 27001 certification but also undergo penetration testing yearly. An external penetration tester is allowed into the back end of a test cloud environment, they try to break things and find vulnerabilities, we’re then presented with a report on what they found, which allows us to fix those gaps and keep improving our security posture over time” Penetration testing allows the Formpipe Cloud team to proactively close gaps that could represent a security risk.
Transparency around Formpipe Cloud’s security measures is also a priority for Dene and the cloud team. “We share our ISO and penetration testing reports with Formpipe Cloud customers,” he said. When a customer is considering joining Formpipe Cloud, they have the opportunity to send any questions they have to the team. “They can ask us questions like “Where will this data be stored?” or “What’s your access control policy?” to ensure everything is as it should be. We take this stuff very seriously.”
Working towards a greener future
The creation of Formpipe Cloud represents a key step in Formpipe’s journey towards sustainability. Last year, Dene sat down with Roger Karlsson, Digital Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, to discuss the importance of sustainability in cloud technology. “Microsoft has really helped us on our ESG journey,” Dene said. “By its nature, the cloud is more efficient than on-premise because you don’t have to deal with big, dedicated servers. If you’re only using 10% of it, you’ve still got 90% of it sat there doing nothing, but it’s using power.”
“We use scaling technology like Kubernetes and Docker containers to scale performance up and down to meet demand.” To illustrate how it works, Dene used the example of bank statements. “Thirty days of the month, banks’ document creation side of things is relatively quiet. They’re not producing many documents. However, on the final day of the month, they produce loads of documents in the form of bank statements. It’s on this day that we give them more compute to meet this sudden increase in demand. As soon as the load starts to come down, we scale back down.”
By trading on-premise infrastructure for the cloud, we have saved 18.48 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent—enough to power a car for a 72,130 km journey. As well as making our customers’ lives easier, Formpipe is embracing cloud technologies to contribute to a greener future.
Reflecting on his Formpipe career
When asked about his most significant achievements since joining the company eight years ago, Dene said, “I’d probably say signing our first cloud customer, and the fact that they’re still with us eight years later.” But the professional wins don’t stop there. “The second would be leaving the team. By that, I mean getting the Formpipe Cloud team to the point where they were ready to move out of “startup” mode and into business as usual, which required new leadership and enabled me to move on to a new challenge. They’re so good, and I’m very proud of how far they’ve come, considering the team didn’t exist four years ago.”
What does the future hold for Formpipe Cloud?
Asked what the future holds for Formpipe Cloud, Dene said, “We’re continuing our work on scalability and monitoring. Regarding monitoring, we want to provide different options in the future to give our customers more options. With scalability, we’re making changes to Lasernet and Autoform DM all the time to tweak their performance profiles. For example, a recent release of Autoform DM improved search performance by 130% for customers with large data sets.” We look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.
Do you want access to best-in-class customer communication management software but are tired of managing every aspect of enterprise software? Formpipe Cloud let's you focus on your core business rather than wrestling with your infrastructure. We handle hosting, security, maintenance and more, keeping your data safe and secure while you focus on delivering solutions for your customers.
