Sourced Group offers Mattermost-as-a-Service for enterprises

June 23, 2017

Platform

My name is Warren and I work as an Application Delivery Consultant for Sourced Group. At Sourced Group, I work with teams among our Enterprise client base to help them modernize and migrate their application portfolios to the public cloud.

Sourced is excited to announce, in conjunction with Mattermost, the general availability of Mattermost as-a-Service delivered via Sourced’s Amino platform.

Mattermost is an industry leading, open source workplace communication solution that supports messaging for web, PCs, and phones. Unlike its competitors, the Mattermost codebase is built on an open platform with a large community of contributors that includes a number of enterprises. Amino is a platform designed by Sourced Engineering that encompasses years of automation and public cloud consulting experience in the enterprise. Through the Amino platform, Sourced Engineering is able to provide a private, “as-a-Service”-type experience for products (now including Mattermost) that would otherwise need to be deployed and managed by internal technology teams.

What is Amino?

Amino is a platform that allows Sourced Engineering to select complex software such as Mattermost, define a customer, and marry the two together in a highly automated deployment. These deployments carry with them the principles and capabilities prescribed to our clients by the Sourced consulting team – infrastructure as code, auto heal, auto scale, detailed monitoring, intrinsic patching, geographically disperse backups and centralized logging. The deployment is provided as a tailored service that customers can leverage to avoid the high operational costs of maintaining these capabilities by themselves.

Through the continued investment and evolution of Amino, Sourced Engineering has been able to substantially reduce the human capital required to deploy and run applications defined in the Sourced Engineering product portfolio. As customers share an application definition (but never a deployment), new features and capabilities in the platform become immediately available to all customers.

Applications deployed by Amino are always private to the customer. This is achieved by utilizing dedicated public cloud accounts, virtual networks, and peering arrangements. Furthermore, all application data is encrypted with encryption keys that are retained by the customer at all times. As a result, the customer will always own their data without necessarily having to manage the application generating or store the data itself. This is a key differentiator from other generally available SaaS offerings.

Figure 1: Amino Deployments

Why choose Mattermost and Amino over other Workplace Communication SaaS products?

For data sensitive organizations, the ability to deploy a workplace communication solution privately and contribute to an open codebase is very appealing. This is especially true with the workplace collaboration movement driving greater integration with more business-critical systems. Customers can enjoy a variety of Mattermost deployment options and rest assured that their solution will always be dedicated, private, and encrypted as described in the following deployment options:

fig 2

Figure 2: Connecting Services to an Enterprise Network: Deployment Model Options

There are many SaaS products supporting workplace communication and collaboration in the market today. However, Mattermost/Amino deployments can serve to provide key differentiating characteristics. Organizations or enterprises that are seeking the following outcomes from their communication solution are likely to be interested in Mattermost delivered via Amino as a solution:

Increase the ability to configure the solution to suit the needs of the organization
Many organizations are constrained by regulatory directives, data sovereignty concerns, SLA requirements, or otherwise. In the current market these organizations are locked out of SaaS offerings which leaves them at a competitive disadvantage. By deploying Mattermost privately via Amino, Sourced can provide a more tailored experience to the customer. Control over where data resides, how it is encrypted, and how the service is monitored are all examples of the flexibility offered when configuring the service. Furthermore, due to Mattermost’s open source nature the complete API is made available to developers for application customization.
Increase the security posture of the solution
By deploying Mattermost ‘behind the firewall’ in private networks hosted in the cloud, the organization can mitigate against the risk of loss/breach of data stored by other third-party SaaS providers. Using Amino, all data is stored in private networks and encryption keys are owned solely by the enterprise. Therefore, the data is strictly owned by the enterprise which differs from other many SaaS products on the market today. Amino also provides deployment models that have the ability to run without access to public Internet.
Ability to scale the solution quickly
All Amino-deployed services such as Mattermost are built on internet-scale technologies that allow growth from teams to large enterprises while maintaining speed and performance. The private service leverages commodity hardware to offer high availability, auto-scaling, and auto-healing that allows the enterprise to operate seamlessly through individual hardware failures.
Remove the risk of outages caused by multi-tenancy solutions
Other SaaS offerings may be based upon multi-tenancy solutions whereby behavior or performance of another tenant can negatively affect your service. By providing a dedicated account where Mattermost is hosted, Amino can mitigate the risk of outages caused by multi-tenancy.
Host data monitoring internally
Amino provides detailed monitoring and centralized logging of a Mattermost deployment using industry standard tools such as Splunk and Datadog. This keeps data contained without the need to send data to third-party SaaS monitoring tools.
Ability to securely integrate with existing systems
As mentioned, there is an ongoing movement whereby workplace messaging tools are required to have increasing integration with business-critical systems. In most cases the business-critical systems are hosted on premise where connectivity to SaaS products raises substantial and valid security concerns as external resources must be granted access to internal systems. By deploying Mattermost privately, enterprises can rest assured that these integration points are not exposing internal systems to malicious attacks.

More about Sourced Group

Sourced Group is a Systems Integrator based out of Australia and Canada that was founded in 2009. Sourced has a long history of consulting and is a close partner of both Puppet and AWS. Since its inception, Sourced Consulting has been able to deliver a number of industry firsts, including:

Transformation and AWS migration of a large airline’s website and booking engine
First ever regulated retail banking application on AWS
Entire business AWS migration of a large healthcare provider

Sourced’s deep consulting experience has facilitated the development of its Engineering team which, leveraging our consulting experience in the enterprise, deliver engineered products “as-a-Service” to our customers.