The Foreign-Trade Zone Corporation
Offers SmartZone Premier Software as a Service (SaaS)

The move to providing SmartZone Premier Foreign-Trade Zone Software as a Service was made as result of client demand, and our desire to offer the most flexible and secure Foreign-Trade Zone Software available.

As with our approach in other areas of SmartZone Premier, we offer a superior environment for providing our SaaS. The SmartZone Premier’s SaaS solution ensures your data is safe, maintains the highest level of uptime, and ensures you have access to your data when you need it. Our SaaS environment provides an increased level of high availability with full replication and redundancy of all hardware and all software, as well as all aspects of data warehousing and storage.

• Complete Hardware Redundancy: All SmartZone Premier Hardware offers the maximum level of redundancy available.  To ensure our clients have the highest level of “uptime” possible the SZP team has created a completely redundant environment.  In addition, 100% of our hardware redundancy and failover is automatic, which is almost unheard of.  While many SaaS providers offer redundancy in only one area, such as just the database itself, it is exceptionally rare to have the level of redundancy offered by SZP such as:
• Redundant Application Server/s
• Redundant Database Server/s
• Redundant Switches
• Redundant Firewalls
• Redundant ABI VPN Devices
• Redundant Virus Servers
  

• Automated Application and Database Replication and Failover:  SmartZone Premier SaaS offers a unique environment that offers you full data and uptime protection.   If any component of the primary application server or the primary database server fails, an identical server is standing by so it can take over the process affected by the failed component or device.  The fact that this failover is automated, and does not rely on human intervention, removes potential for costly downtime and delays. Our goal and SaaS plan and design is structured so that in the unlikely event a device or component failure occurs, the failure will be completely transparent to the SmartZone Premier user. The continuous replication at the entire server level, rather than just data replication, allows for this seamless failover plan, and offers a huge improvement over simple database replication.
• In addition, if either the application server or the database server crashes completely, the redundant standby server takes over the processes without data loss.  This provides a superior level of high availability compared to others.
  

• Automated Failover of all other hardware: In addition to the application and database server/s, every SmartZone Premier hardware device in our SaaS environment has live replication and automated failover.  To help illustrate our commitment to offering the highest quality SaaS environment, we have listed a few of the devices for which we have full replication and failover below:
• Redundant Switches—As with the rest of the SmartZone Premier high availability plan, even our switches have redundancy to ensure that no single point of failure exists.
• Redundant Firewalls—Our redundant firewalls each have their own connection to the tier one bandwidth provider, which is also redundant.
• Redundant ABI Routers—Our ABI VPN connections to Customs and Border Protection are fully redundant with automated failover.  This level of replication and high availability is unique for VPN connections of this type.
• Redundant Virus Servers—Our servers, applications, and data are protected from intrusion and attacks at every point possible.  The inbound data is scanned, and all servers are protected on a real-time basis, as well as with scheduled scans.  Should the primary virus server fail, a second identical virus server immediately takes over protecting the SaaS environment.

Automatic Scheduled Offsite Backup: In addition to all of the safeguards placed on the data, hardware, and infrastructure SmartZone Premiere SaaS offers, daily scheduled backups of all data is sent to an offsite data facility. If desired, offsite backups can occur even more frequently.

• Data Center Uptime Features and Benefits: The SmartZone Premier Team considered a large number of factors when deciding on our SaaS environment. Our requirements were demanding, and were not easy to fulfill. A few of our requirements, that are now significant benefits to our SaaS clients are listed below:
  • One reason companies’ lose access to SaaS based applications and their data for an extended period of time is due to catastrophes, such as flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters. To virtually eliminate these types of catastrophes, the SmartZone Premier team chose a state of the art facility located in Phoenix. Why Phoenix? Well, as you can see by the map below, Phoenix is virtually immune from natural disasters and catastrophes. This selection gives our clients extra piece of mind.
    
    
    
     

    Other Features and Benefits

  • A state of the art Data Center that maintains SAS 70 Certification
  • UPS Backup Power for the entire data center
  • Redundant power provided with N + 1 backup generators
  • Failover power generation in addition to the standard backup
  • State-of-the-art cooling system with redundancy
    • Cooling is provided by McQuay Modular Central Plants with N + 1 failover
  • Bandwidth provided by a blend of three Tier One providers.  This blend eliminates the chance of the bandwidth (internet) going down.
  • Three Tier Security level to ensure a secure environment. The three tier security includes:
    • Biometric Readers
    • Card Readers
    • 24/7 On Site Security Personnel