As one of the UK’s leading managed service providers, Kocho empowers its clients to achieve cloud and mobile transformation with its innovative identity, connectivity, and security solutions. With over 350 employees, the organization offers well over 20 years of deep technical experience, and multiple Microsoft partner of the Year Awards, across identity, cloud transformation, endpoint management, and cyber security.
Over the last 2 years Kocho has grown steadily through a considered strategy of mergers and acquisitions. This included the recent acquisition of Mobliciti, and its market-leading expertise in strategic mobile management and security.
As Kocho expanded, providing effective network traffic management became more complex and time-consuming – and that’s where Vercara’s came in.
The challenges of success.
As Kocho has grown, the services it offers to clients have expanded dramatically. The resulting growth leadi to a rapid, sustained increase in the use of the company’s managed services, increasing demands on its operations.
One of these high-demand services is unified endpoint management, which optimizes network security and usability. Kocho’s client roster includes many highly regulated organizations in financial and legal services, and these clients could not accept any compromises in this critical function.
“When we’re managing connectivity across a client’s global network, they expect an ultra-resilient, completely reliable service,” explained Douglas Reid, Head of Operations for Kocho. “We are committed to delivering on those expectations.”
Kocho had been handling these functions without a traffic management solution, using manual systems and setups. However, as its client list grew – along with the size and complexity of client networks – the Kocho team recognized the need for simplified traffic management.
“We manage networks that combine cloud and mobile resources with multiple ISPs and data centers and numerous IP addresses,” Reid added. “We needed a solution that could securely and reliably direct traffic across complicated, hybrid network architectures.”
Research uncovers a perfect solution.
The Kocho team began an exhaustive market research effort to identify their best option. They discovered traffic direction across complex networks is a challenging role to fill.
“Many of the established, specialized solutions would have been fairly difficult to install and use in our application, and expensive as well,” said Joel Satterley, Technical Architect for Kocho. “We began looking at DNS services, thinking they could offer the traffic direction capabilities we needed.”
They discovered DNS solutions that were simple and affordable but fell short on other critical criteria. Some lacked capabilities such as failover or flexible options for load balancing. Others lacked usability with cluttered management tools that were hard to navigate.
Some provided little or no customer service. “We looked at one solution from a global leader in cloud services,” recalled Satterley, “but the help system was difficult, and if you had a question that wasn’t covered, you were out of luck. They had no support team.”
Kocho needed a capable, easy-to-use solution they could absolutely rely on, supported by outstanding customer service. “If an issue arises that we can’t address,” Reid said, “we have to know we can get help to resolve it quickly.”
Finally, they found UltraDNS. “Our research identified it as a reliable, resilient, efficient, and well-reviewed service with low latency and advanced features,” Satterley said, “The more we looked into it, the clearer it became that it was perfect for our needs.”
Vercara delivers critical capabilities and more.
UltraDNS has more than met Kocho’s high expectations and demanding requirements.
“We have used it to configure automatic failover and handle load balancing for our clients, and the options for setting up and managing it match our needs very well,” Reid said. “We expect to utilize geographic routing at some point as well.”
“In operation, it’s turned out to be as low maintenance as we expected with excellent usability,” Satterley added. “The portal is easy to use, with a clean GUI and an intuitive help system with excellent documentation. We felt very comfortable handing if off to others in our team to manage.”
Kocho has enjoyed some unexpected benefits as well. “We didn’t anticipate how helpful the reporting would be,” said Satterley. “Looking through the reporting we found a duplication of a DNS record that we hadn’t known about, which we quickly fixed.”
“The per-request billing structure also makes it easy to gauge what we need for our clients,” Reid added, “which makes it simpler to estimate and configure our solutions.”
In fact, Kocho’s experience with Vercara UltraDNS has been so positive that Reid wasn’t able to pick a single stand-out benefit. “Reliability, quality of service, enhanced protection, better uptime… all of it applies,” he said. “We’ve had no downtime from our DNS service. It’s never been an issue for our clients or for us.”
“That’s really the biggest advantage,” Reid concluded. “It’s given us peace of mind.”
Find out how UltraDNS can give you peace of mind with reliable, scalable, worry-free access to your websites and digital infrastructure from anywhere in the world as well as lightning-fast query responses and industry-leading DNS resolution by visiting our product page.
