ReachFive: Earning the trust of online retailers with the high availability they need
About ReachFive
The ReachFive SaaS solution gives companies the tools they need to create and manage the customer accounts that are so vital to online retail. Founded in 2014, today ReachFive solutions manage more than 65 million customer profiles for 50 brands worldwide, helping people interact with companies quickly and easily.
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Contact usReachFive uses Google Cloud to deliver more than 99.99% availability on its SaaS solutions, used by brands worldwide to manage more than 65 million customer accounts.
- Enhances availability with two-zone backup delivered by the Google Cloud network
- Improves security with a separate certificate for each client on multi-tenant architecture
- Targets and blocklists suspicious IP addresses to thwart hacks, including DDoS and brute force attacks
Zero infrastructure downtime for two years and counting
When a customer logs in to an online store, they trust that it will keep personal information private and financial details secure. They also expect a smooth shopping experience, without the need to enter credit card numbers or address information over and over again. That balance of security and convenience is vital for online retail and depends on customer identity and access management, or CIAM. Founded in 2014, ReachFive provides CIAM software as a service (SaaS) to 50 brands, and today, more than 65 million customer profiles run through ReachFive systems worldwide.
“When someone creates an account on L'Occitane, for example, we provide security, access tokens, password storage, data storage, and consent management,” says Guillaume Partenet, Product Director at ReachFive. “L’Occitane operates in 60 countries, so we have to meet needs in Japan, the US, France and everywhere in between. We provide a unified retail experience across platforms; customers can browse items on a tablet, check them on a laptop, then buy them from their phone. That journey has to be seamless. If it isn’t, customers will go to another online retailer to make their purchase.”
“Our solutions need to authenticate users 24 hours a day, seven days a week, worldwide. If our service is down, even for an update, customers can’t access shopping baskets, saved card details, and delivery information. Our solution plays a critical role, so we need to guarantee clients 99.99% availability.”
—Guillaume Partenet, Product Director, ReachFiveCIAM is an essential part of the online retail experience, which is why ReachFive promises 99.99% availability to its clients. So when outages on its previous cloud provider compromised that guarantee, the company looked for a replacement it could trust.
“Our solutions need to authenticate users 24 hours a day, seven days a week, worldwide,” says Guillaume. “If our service is down, even for an update, customers can’t access shopping baskets, saved card details, and delivery information. Our solution plays a critical role, so we need to guarantee clients 99.99% availability.”
Delivering the availability that retailers expect
In the world of online retail, customers expect to access secure and seamless purchasing experiences round the clock. That’s why ReachFive offers a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% availability to its clients, a guarantee that its solution will not be down for more than four minutes in a month.
“A managed infrastructure solution makes a big difference to a small company,” says Guillaume. “If we spend all of our time and resources maintaining databases, we can’t create new features. We need a cloud provider that offers managed infrastructure that we don’t need to maintain.”
He adds: “Google Cloud was the easiest to use from the solutions we looked at, as well as the least complicated and most cost-effective. Because many of our clients use Google Cloud as well, it was a natural fit.”
“Our clients can choose to deploy our solution on any infrastructure, but 90% of them use Google Cloud. Google Cloud delivers excellent availability, and we make use of its managed services to deliver additional functionality, from more granular security options to a reliable Redis cache.”
—Guillaume Partenet, Product Director, ReachFiveWith two-zone backup on Google Cloud, ReachFive ensures that even if Compute Engine instances are interrupted in one region, the solution will continue to run on servers elsewhere. And through its CI/CD pipeline (continuous integration and continuous deployment) based on Terraform and Ansible, it updates its solution up to 10 times a day, without compromising availability.
Google Cloud is now the default infrastructure for the ReachFive SaaS solution, but it can be deployed to any infrastructure, depending on the demands of clients. Presented with that choice, however, clients overwhelmingly opt for Google Cloud.
“Our clients can choose to deploy our solution on any infrastructure, but a vast majority of them use Google Cloud,” says Guillaume. “Google Cloud delivers excellent availability, and we make use of its managed services to deliver additional functionality, from more granular security options to a reliable Redis cache.”
Optimizing its SaaS solution with managed services
As well as managed infrastructure, the team uses managed services to optimize its solution, such as BigQuery ML, which it explores as a way to improve analysis. ReachFive also uses Memorystore for its Redis cache, which provides very short-term memory, such as holding the contents of a shopping basket while a customer completes their payment. “Google Cloud Memorystore is more reliable and cost-effective,” says Guillaume.
The solution is available on either single-tenant or multi-tenant architecture, and for multiple tenants, ReachFive leverages Cloud Load Balancing for improved security. “On other cloud providers, we can only have one certificate on a load balancer, so if we have 20 clients on that architecture, they have to share a single certificate,” says Guillaume. “With Google Cloud Load Balancing, we have a separate certificate for every client, which is more secure.”
Improving security is a constant priority for ReachFive, which safeguards the personal and financial information of millions of people. “Because we manage authentication, hackers see us as the front door to a company,” explains Guillaume. “When they want to break in, they try to break down that door to get to customer data. Google Cloud Armor is a really useful tool to prevent that happening, whether through a DDoS or a brute force attack. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to blacklist suspicious IP addresses.”
“One aspect of our success is that the more clients we work with, the more of a target we become for hackers. Google Cloud keeps us safe with excellent defensive tools, whether it’s Google Cloud Armor or Google Cloud HSM, which we will soon deploy for even stronger security.”
—Guillaume Partenet, Product Director, ReachFiveFine-tuning a successful model for global expansion
In two years since migrating its solutions, ReachFive reports 100% availability from its Google Cloud infrastructure. Now the team is looking to provide its solutions worldwide with the Google Cloud global network.
“One aspect of our success is that the more clients we work with, the more of a target we become for hackers,” says Guillaume. “Google Cloud keeps us safe with excellent defensive tools, whether it’s Google Cloud Armor or Cloud HSM, which we will soon deploy for even stronger security.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About ReachFive
The ReachFive SaaS solution gives companies the tools they need to create and manage the customer accounts that are so vital to online retail. Founded in 2014, today ReachFive solutions manage more than 65 million customer profiles for 50 brands worldwide, helping people interact with companies quickly and easily.