Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) Case Study

Use case

Business continuity, Supply chain resilience, Cloud Continuity

Industry

Transportation and Public Infrastructure.

Team size

300+ employees

Services

Escrow as a Service (EaaS),
Verification Services

ATOC is made up of several divisions, many of which rely upon Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Its customer experience operations division comprises ofcommercial activities and National Rail Enquiries (NRE). Handling an average of 2.5 million enquiries every weekday, NRE is undoubtedly the definitive source of customer information for all rail passengers. NRE provide up-to-the minute information on train times, fares, reservations and service disruptions through a range of different platforms including their mobile application and website.

Another of ATOC’s key divisions is Rail Settlement Plan (RSP). RSP provides and manages, on behalf of franchised train operating companies and ticket retailers, a range of centralised shared services enabling the provision of a GB wide rail ticket retail proposition. ATOC approached PaaS, IaaS and bespoke software provider KCOM to build and implement a new Live Sales Management (LSM) system for the RSP division to help cut costs and meet customer experience goals. KCOM partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the LSM system, and provide the rail industry with a high availability cloud-based solution to support the online sale and collection of rail tickets by passengers from one of 2,500 self-service ticket machines.

Challenge

Moving this business critical system to the cloud has enabled ATOC to substantially reduce operating costs as the system is now hosted and maintained by third party bespoke cloud integrator KCOM. However, as well as the benefits, ATOC also understand, the challenges faced with reliance on such cloud-based solutions.

The new LSM system is heavily relied upon each day by all GB franchised train operating companies and ticket retailers, it issues in excess of one billion tickets per year and handles ticket sales of £2bn per annum. Any disruption to this service could have a catastrophic effect upon revenue, reputation and relationships within the GB rail network. ATOC recognised this and decided to take the necessary steps to mitigate the inherent risks associated with using an application hosted by a third party bespoke cloud integrator.

“Escode have supported us in mitigating any potential risk and putting in place a solid disaster recovery plan, should the worst happen we have the means to continue operating as normal with minimum disruption.”

– Vishal Varsani, Infrastructure Service Manager ATOC

Solution

Following a review of the marketplace and the protection solutions on offer, ATOC decided to partner with the global leader in software escrow, Escode.

ATOC was looking for a cloud disaster recovery and business continuity solution that would ensure access to its business critical LSM system should its bespoke cloud integrator (KCOM) go out of business or fail to meet its contractual obligations. As such Escode recommended that ATOC should carry out a Verification to gain assurance that should KCOM no longer be available it would still have the means to replicate the system, quickly, while seeking an alternative SaaS provider.

An Escode consultant visited KCOM’s site to observe the process of creating a replicated, working version of the application, documenting every detail of the creation, restoration, deployment and maintenance processes. Escode then stored the Cloud Formation Templates, used to quickly redeploy the system in the replicated AWS account, and produced a detailed handbook which can be used by ATOC to recreate the system should its SaaS Provider fail in the future.

“Escode’s SaaS Escrow solutions products have supported us in mitigating any potential risk and putting in place a solid disaster recovery plan, should the worst happen we have the means to continue operating as normal with minimum disruption.”

– Vishal Varsani, Infrastructure Service Manager at ATOC

Results

Escode has provided ATOC with independent assurance that the material deposited in escrow contains all of the relevant details to generate a copy of the environment to run the Live Sales Management system and that this is available for immediate use should a release event occur.

Vishal Varsani, Infrastructure Service Manager at ATOC commented: “Escode’s SaaS Escrow solutions products have supported us in mitigating any potential risk and putting in place a solid disaster recovery plan, should the worst happen we have the means to continue operating as normal with minimum disruption.”

Jayesh Patel, Global Managing Director at Escode, concludes: “Passenger demand for rail travel is only set to increase and it’s great to be working with an organisation like ATOC as they proactively look to mitigate the potentially disastrous risks associated with adopting cloud-based systems.”