VNC grows and optimizes a secure enterprise communications and collaboration solution with Google Cloud
About VNC - Virtual Network Consult AG
Headquartered in Switzerland with subsidiaries in Germany and India, Virtual Network Consult AG develops secure open source-based enterprise apps used by banks, governments, not-for-profits, healthcare operatives, and small and large businesses worldwide.
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About DoiT International
DoiT International helps businesses build and scale cloud solutions.
VNC migrates its global on-premises enterprise communications and collaboration solutions named VNClagoon to Google Cloud to enable unlimited scaling and optimal efficiency.
Google Cloud results
- Scales clusters via Google Kubernetes Engine, which reduces build times by 50% and cuts costs for data center infrastructure and personnel by 60%
- Migrates full on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud in under a year
- Eliminates existing video conferencing latency issues
- Delivers cost-effective limitless scaling
- Unblocks developer time through backup automation
VNC securely migrates to Google Cloud
Enterprise or unified communications enable individuals, businesses, and organizations across the world to communicate anytime, anywhere safely and securely. With international software giants and telcos, as well as smaller local providers all working in this space, it’s a crowded market. The global unified communications market size was valued at $78.33 billion in 2020, and it’s expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.5% between 2021 to 2028.
One name that stands out from this crowd is Virtual Network Consult AG (VNC). Headquartered in Switzerland with subsidiaries in Germany and India and teams in 30 countries covering every continent, VNC provides secure communication and enables remote collaboration for numerous organizations across the globe. It has two customer bases. The first is made up of its partners, largely ISPs, ISVs and telcos who offer VNC’s products and services under their own brands to their customer bases. The second is direct customers, who range from small SMEs to large financial institutions, not-for-profits, healthcare operatives, and government agencies.
“Our mission is to provide secure communication and collaboration to our users. All of our integrated products are compatible with any device and include email, messaging, video conferencing, task management, project management, calendars, contact management, and file sharing,” explains Andrea Wörrlein, co-founder of VNC.
“Our USP is our open-source technology. All of our products and codes are open, so they can conform to the strictest data privacy regulations and retain digital sovereignty. Plus, with VNClagoon, you can create a branded environment that flexibly integrates with our partners’ and customers’ products and platforms.”
“The decision to migrate to Google Cloud was taken on the basis of its secure global access, and the fact that it can be relied on worldwide was super important too.”
—Andrea Wörrlein, co-founder, VNC - Virtual Network ConsultGuaranteeing data security with Google Cloud
Ensuring its customers’ privacy and securing their data is paramount for VNC. It made the decision to close its main on-premises data center, which limited its ability to scale and optimize productivity, in 2020. It then began looking for a provider that could meet its strict privacy and security standards and offer the agility it required to develop and deliver exceptional, reliable open-source products. Google Cloud ticked all of these boxes.
“The decision to migrate to Google Cloud was taken on the basis of its secure global access,” explains Wörrlein, “and the fact that it can be relied on worldwide was super important too.”
Each one of VNC’s customers expects a high-quality uninterrupted service from every VNClagoon product they use. Among these is video conferencing, the quality of which can be prone to latency issues, compounded by a reliance on data centers that don’t offer global coverage. Latency issues are no longer a concern following the migration to Google Cloud, and VNC is comfortable in the knowledge that it’s offering a reliable 24/7 service.
Paving the way for a smooth migration
VNC began its migration to Google Cloud from its on-premises Swiss data center in 2020. Google Cloud partner, DoiT International, assisted the move. “DoiT was available for us during the whole process and answered lots of our questions,” says Wörrlein. “They advised us how to do things on a technical level and on an administrative level, showing us how to manage the cloud platform and where we could make cost savings.”
VNC’s development platform moved to the cloud first, followed by its testing and live platforms, and then it began moving its partners and customers over. One customer that VNC migrated to Google Cloud was DFB GmbH, a subsidiary of the German Football Association (DFB). At the beginning of 2021, it migrated the DFBnet mailbox system to Google Cloud from DFB’s local data center. VNC’s secure environment on Google Cloud now handles more than 50,000 DFBnet mailboxes, each weekend delivering results from numerous football matches in Germany. And, as it uses VNC’s white-label option, the DFBnet mailbox is branded as a DFBnet tool. Google infrastructure is used by VNC for DFB as a highly scalable platform for PaaS and IaaS services, but not as a SaaS cloud, meaning that all its data remains secure within VNC’s applications and databases.
“Like all of our customers, we had to show DFB GmbH that in moving to Google Cloud its data would remain secure before it agreed to the move,” says Wörrlein. ”We take time to demonstrate the strength of the platform, and we show that although we use Google Cloud for our infrastructure, we are still in full control of our secure apps and our software.”
“Compute Engine provides tangible benefits in terms of costs, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance. As soon as a problem is discovered, we can quickly fix it in the code.”
—Andrea Wörrlein, co-founder, VNC - Virtual Network ConsultRapidly scaling up and down
With Google Cloud, VNC is also now confident that it can deliver unlimited scale and that it can scale up and down as required, while only paying for what it uses. When VNC relied on its data center, it had to purchase hardware to grow its capacity along with its client base. That meant that in slow traffic periods, sections of its data center were dormant, yet still powered up ready to move into action when required.
“When we had our local data center, the developers would ask me if they could roll out a test for, say, a hundred video bridges, and I would say yes you can do it, but it’s going to be costly,” explains Wörrlein. “Now, with our microservice architecture, within minutes we can do such a test and then scale the service right back down again to save overheads.”
VNC uses Google Kubernetes Engine to manage its scaling, deploying clusters as and when they are needed based on customer requirements. And, Google Cloud also ensures that VNC can deploy a fully automated CI-CD process that scales exponentially, allowing it to perform hundreds of builds daily and deliver features faster to its customers.
“We can now deploy a full VNClagoon level stack to a customer that can scale to thousands of users within a matter of days,” reveals Wörrlein, “where previously this would have taken weeks to arrange. This has reduced our build times by 50% and costs by 60%.”
“We are now confident that we can rapidly and securely scale our partner and direct customer base with Google Cloud. There is nothing left to do on a technical level; we are now focused on signing and onboarding the next generation of users.”
—Andrea Wörrlein, co-founder, VNC - Virtual Network ConsultBacking up seamlessly
VNC provides more than a means for companies to communicate and collaborate, it also offers data storage and backup services. Everything from emails to files, and video calls to calendars can be backed up. For this it now relies on Cloud SQL, which enables it to automate upgrades and backups, saving time and labor, and Compute Engine, which automatically clears redundant storage and provides backup management.
“Compute Engine provides tangible benefits in terms of costs, disaster recovery, and fault tolerance. As soon as a problem is discovered, we can quickly fix it in the code,” says Wörrlein. “We recently found a translation error and we fixed it and deployed it across all our platforms within two hours, which was amazing.”
Compute Engine also frees up time for VNC’s development team to focus on developing and testing its products and services. This doesn’t mean that VNC has cut back its development team, however. In fact, Wörrlein is pleased to confirm that she’s expanding her workforce. “We are taking on more developers to keep up with the business growth that our scalable VNClagoon products and flexible environments like the Google Cloud have afforded us, because we’re now delivering faster and more reliable services to our partners and customers,” she says.
VNC has now completed migrating its internal infrastructure to the cloud and is continuing to migrate more of its on-premises partners and customers over. “A few of our partners and customers, largely financial or government institutions, have decided to stay with an on-premises solution and for some of them, we are beginning to deploy Anthos to unify the management of infrastructure and applications on-premises, and in the cloud,” adds Wörrlein.
Although the move to the cloud involved a substantial investment, VNC is already seeing significant cost savings and hopes to recoup its investment within 2 years.
Wörrlein concludes: “We are now confident that we can rapidly and securely scale our partner and direct customer base with Google Cloud. There is nothing left to do on a technical level, we are now focused on signing and onboarding the next generation of users.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About VNC - Virtual Network Consult AG
Headquartered in Switzerland with subsidiaries in Germany and India, Virtual Network Consult AG develops secure open source-based enterprise apps used by banks, governments, not-for-profits, healthcare operatives, and small and large businesses worldwide.
About DoiT International
DoiT International helps businesses build and scale cloud solutions.