Savenet wins IT project of the year three times in a row
Savenet Solutions took home the IT project of the year prize at this year’s Tech Excellence Awards, the first company to win the award three years in a row. We caught up with Savenet chief technology officer Lorcan Cunningham to hear how his team achieved this.
You won IT project of the year (SME) at the Tech Excellence awards – what made your project stand out?
The project was based on Azure infrastructure as code (IaC), which itself was quite unique. And we delivered significant benefits to our client – Reitigh. They needed to repeatedly build new customer environments to ISO 27001 and CIS benchmarking standards, with a 100% security and 100% compliance scores. The manual method was taking three to four weeks; we were tasked with reducing this deployment down to one week. We automated the deployment to just six hours, and consequently, were able to save them 90% on their new customer onboarding costs.
I also think our ‘can do’ attitude stood out. The timeline of the project was four weeks and the amount of work that needed to be done was significant. But we identified AI as an enabler and used it to complete the project on time.
Your project with Reitigh includes ‘hot’ trends such as cyber security, automation, cloud, and AI. Do you think the challenges businesses are facing today require that kind of all-in thinking?
This project is a prime example of ‘all-in’ thinking. By integrating cyber security and security compliance measures, we ensure the protection of sensitive data and systems. Automation streamlines processes, reducing manual effort and the potential for error. Cloud technology offers scalability and flexibility, and AI enhances decision-making. In the case of this project, we used AI to accelerate the learning of a new programming language.
This holistic approach addresses the immediate business needs but also positions them for future growth and innovation. It’s the synergy of these tech trends that enables companies to stay ahead in any competitive landscape.
In your awards entry you mention that you achieved the “near impossible”. How did you do that?
Innovating and thinking outside the box is part of the Savenet DNA. We are problem solvers at our core and to be the best at problem solving you need to know your industry inside out. So when someone comes to you with a problem, you know the tools and skills required to solve it. Our attitude in Savenet is,’every problem has a solution’.
At one point, all of our current cloud services started out as a problem that our existing customers asked us to solve, and once we solved it, we turned it into a recurring revenue service.
You’ve won this award three times in a row. What makes you unique among your competitors?
We really care about our customers, I know everyone says they do, but if you spoke to our customers I think they would back me up. When I set up Savenet I wanted us to be different, I wanted us to promise the customer requirements and over deliver on them, be a true partner to our customers and grow with them.
In the cloud space we are thought leaders and innovators and have brought a number of firsts to the Irish market: in 2005, we were one of the first online backup companies in Ireland, in 2007, we built the first multi-tenant dloud platform and used it to deliver the first disaster recovery- as-a-service and desktop-as-a-service to the Irish market, and in 2013, at a time when public cloud was deemed too risky for the financial services sector, we built an object storage platform to rival AWS S3. We also take security seriously; we’ve been ISO 27001 certified since 2014, and we implemented ISO 27001 before our customers even asked for it, and it’s now part of our company DNA.
Would you like to think you can win this same award again next year?
This time last year we were asking ourselves the same question and we joked about the possibility. It seemed impossible at the time and had never been done before, but we did it. Now, a year later, we are wondering if we can win it four times in a row. We know that the projects are judged every year on their own merits, which means we just need a project that is good enough to win it. As it happens we are working on two projects at the moment that could be considered contenders, maybe even good enough to win IT architect of year. It’s been seven years since I last won that particular award and I may be in with a chance next year.
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