Wine Industry SaaS Technology
Discover a cloud-based, wine industry-specific Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and why it can make a difference for your wine business. Plus learn a bit more about the technology itself, including how we deliver a platform that is secure, flexible and user-friendly.
Why consider SaaS technology for your wine business?
There are far fewer business compromises with industry-dedicated SaaS. The core system meets the need of a particular market sector or segment, whilst functionally specific and well-developed adjacent software and services extend the potential for solving business problems and realising value.
No versioning issues.
Improvements are applied to the provider’s servers after having gone through testing and user acceptance testing in different environments before being applied to live.
All-in costs.
Your provider worries about hosting, servers, performance, security, penetration testing/ resilience to hacking and insurance. You get on with running your business without having to worry about infrastructure and cyber risk.
Future-proofed roadmap.
Typically a small or mid-sized business can start with a basic set of options and add to them over them as growth plans take shape and requirements become more complex or ambitious.
A successful SaaS Platform reduces cost of ownership, improves availability and security, keeps you up to date with the latest version, gives you access to road-tested new features and makes the notion of software with limited lifecycles obsolete.
The benefits of sector-specific SaaS
Efficiency gains.
Selecting an industry specific solution that reflects and helps to define wine industry best practice, makes your business more efficient. That means streamlining processes rather than asking you to conform to a broad-based, one-size-fits-all, high-level principle of best practise.
Simplicity.
Whilst it’s perfectly possible to circumnavigate hard coded work processes that broad-based principles establish, it can create elaborated workflows that become more time-consuming than they ought to be. So when a fine wine business adapts to them, it takes longer to do tasks that should be straightforward, creating a less efficient business.
Lower cost.
There is an expense to localising software to fine wine. That’s one of the reasons why general business software provided by large players (and challenger generic SaaS ERPs) are expensive by the time value added resellers have localised the software to make it work for the fine wine market. Higher prices in this case don’t mean you’re getting more for your money.
Data and insights.
Information, rich media and insight are transforming business. Yet very few industry specific solutions include market data, and on a sufficiently detailed basis, to be able to leverage use of the information through all customer touch points and internally to drive insights and recommendations. The benefits of doing so are clear cut, with significant time savings to be gained by not having to rekey data, and the financial advantage to be gained by business owners through derived insights that present choices of what to do with different stock positions.
The technology
The platform is a secure, flexible, and user-friendly solution designed to meet modern business needs. Built on a reliable Microsoft framework with a robust SQL database and a well-structured data model, it ensures optimal performance. Security is a top priority, with advanced SSL encryption, private cloud servers in secure UK-based data centers, and rigorous quarterly penetration testing complemented by annual ethical hacking reviews. Additionally, the platform is being certified with Cyber Essentials Plus, a UK Government-endorsed cybersecurity program, ensuring robust data protection at every level.
Microsoft asp.net framework with SQL server database
Fully normalised database model
Responsive website design supporting PC, laptops, tablets and mobile devices (not to forget trading screens!)
Multilingual and multi-currency frameworks
White labelling built-in through all functions and dimensions(style, content and behaviour)
Modularised approach for all the major application components
Fully configurable back office: user administration, account/trading functions, access control functions, audit trail of website activity
Full user administration
Audit trail of site activity
SSL
All Wine Owners’ sites are run on https/SSL wildcard certificate provided by Comodo CA Limited. These are the highest levels of SSL security – 2048 bit digital signatures and up to 256 bit encryption as standard with a $250,000 relying party warranty.
When installed on a web server, a SSL certificate activates the padlock and the https protocol and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser.
Private cloud servers are hosted at UKFast, an award winning data centre who are certified to ISO 27001 and ISO 9001:2008, verifying robust security practices within their data centres and operations.
Wine Owners is in process of being certified with the Cyber Essentials Plus program; developed with the Information Security Forum (ISF), the Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises Consortium (IASME) and the British Standards Institution (BSI), and is endorsed by the UK Government.
Penetration testing
Every quarter a remote penetration test of the Wine Owners platform is conducted externally by a specialist 3rd party. The scan tests the platform against a large library of known vulnerabilities and probes for potential routes that might lead to a compromise of the system.
The software used to do this is a world-class product that incorporates the latest hacking techniques and attack patterns.
The types of vulnerabilities checked include operating system and network vulnerabilities as well as database and HTML-based attack vectors. In addition the system is analysed for behaviour traits that may indicate botnet activity or other types of system compromise.
Since 2018 we have additionally contracted with a specialist firm who employ ethical hackers, and who spend a week a year attempting to penetrate our servers (with the purpose of identifying any additional vulnerabilities).