In our last blog post we briefly described our new infrastructure to support our hosted (Software-as-a-Service) customers which brings a boat of improvements. We’ll outline the changes in more detail here.
For the best part of ten years we have provided fully managed helpdesk solutions to organizations of all sizes – some serving only tens of users, others serving thousands a week. Looking after an organization’s helpdesk is no small responsibility, and we do not take it lightly. We’re always looking to improve.
Our goals are simple:
- To improve the experience for your own customers using your helpdesk
- To improve and build upon our existing technical infrastructure, and offer customers access to the latest proven industry developments
- To improve the business case for adopting Kayako’s hosted solutions (better redundancy, increased data security, improved plan Bs and more control)
Because we have a lot of customers interested in hearing about the guts of our infrastructure, we’ll delve into what is new below. If this stuff bores you, just take away one thing: your hosted helpdesk solution is getting a lot better.
We hope you are as excited as we are about the coming changes!
Helpdesk in the Cloud
Our new infrastructure is the result of years of testing, research and the design of a system tailored to support helpdesks; specific to the needs of an organization delivering customer support.
Helpdesks, files and databases will be hosted in our cloud. Our new infrastructure offers a number of fantastic benefits:
- Rapid scaling - as your organization and helpdesk grows, we can deliver more capacity more quickly
- More power – lots more computing power will be available, keeping your helpdesk incredibly snappy, whatever its size
- Globally distributed network and hardware redundancy – for increased reliability
- More file space – gigabytes of storage available for files, e-mail and ticket attachments
- More frequent backups - we can backup your data more frequently, covering the worse case scenarios
- Live data replication – should a technical issue arise, our systems will automatically recover and switch services over to another facility, without loss of data, in less than a minute (more on this below)
Content delivery network
We will host your helpdesk’s static media (such as images and JavaScript files) on the Kayako content delivery network (CDN).
A CDN is a network of servers spread across the globe. When you make a request for a file hosted on this network (for example, when loading the helpdesk), a router finds the server closest to your location and delivers the files from that server. This means that pages load much quicker because the data has a physically shorter distance to travel.
(There are also other technical benefits that relate to how many web browsers work, but we won’t go into those here).
Distributed DNS
We are rolling out a new distributed DNS service to handle name resolutions (yourname.helpserve.com). The new service is faster and redundant; if one part fails, a backup system will take over immediately.
Live data replication (hot copies)
Your helpdesk and its data will be constantly replicated to another independent infrastructure. This means that should something go wrong, our systems will automatically switch over to the up-to-date replica of your helpdesk, without any data loss.
Better support for custom domains
We currently offer support for custom domains (yourdomain.com or yourname.yourdomain.com). However, they need to be manually set up. We are improving the way in which you can enable and configure a custom domain name on your helpdesk in a few clicks.
SSL certificates
We are planning on introducing support for SSL certificates. As well as keeping communications secure, by enabling SSL on your helpdesk you help foster trust between your organization and your visitors. This might not be available at launch, but will follow very soon.