Sennen

Use case

Business Continuity, Risk Management

Industry

Renewable Energy

Team size

11–50 employees

Services

Escrow as a Service

Challenge

Sennen provide software and services to leading organisations in the renewable energy industry, transforming efficiency and performance through their unique and agile offshore wind management system.

Sennen’s cloud-based software is extensively used for marine operations at one of the world’s largest offshore wind farms. Sennen, recognising the criticality of their platform to operations, tracking and the optimisation of construction and maintenance activity, sought to provide their customers with an independent layer of resilience to provide additional assurance of business continuity.

Offshore wind operations and maintenance (O&M) is a rapidly developing sector. However, with this record-breaking growth comes an increasing level of reliance on wind farms as critical infrastructure for keeping the lights on.

It is estimated that one day of downtime for a 500MW wind farm equates to a loss of approximately £360,000. As a result, not only is it essential for offshore wind farm operators to develop secure digital ecosystems, but it is equally important that the entire supply chain ensures products and solutions are robust, resilient and secure.

With today’s customers demanding even greater levels of resilience from software suppliers, Sennen proactively recognised how a business continuity plan would complement their cloud-based offshore wind management system.

“Our unique software platform was originally developed to meet the exact needs of the largest offshore wind farm. It has transformed how our clients operate their wind farm so we need to ensure they feel confident that in the case of any disruption, the application can still be maintained and will remain effective and efficient.”

– Paul Grimshaw, Co-founder and Software Architect at Sennen

Solution

Sennen reached out to Escode to seek advice on how they could reinforce the resilience of their software application and ensure their clients will always have access to their data and application regardless of unforeseeable disruption.

With Sennen providing a bespoke, business critical system, Escode, part of NCC group’s Account Director and in-house technical team recommended a tailored Escrow as a Service (EaaS) solution to provide not only an architectural overview of how the cloud application is hosted, but also to ensure the client has the ability to access the source code and documented build processes.

Escode’s verification consultant began working with Sennen’s development team by observing a complete build of the software platform from the source code. The entire process was detailed in a comprehensive report, which the client can then use as a step-by-step manual to build the source code into the working application.

Whilst this process focused on the source code element of the cloud application, ensuring Sennen’s client has access to the source code, it is equally important to understand the cloud environment, the application and how it runs in the cloud environment. With the application critical to the way Sennen’s clients operate, the final stage of the solution was to verify the source code and system environment through an EaaS Architecture Verification.

At its simplest, an Architecture Verification is a blueprint of what is being hosted in the cloud environment, which provides information and knowledge on how the system will be maintained if Sennen’s client was required to take legal ownership of the live production environment.

"Having a software resilience expert protecting and verifying our software is incredibly useful for us. Not only does it set us apart from our competitors, we are able to reassure our client by demonstrating the quality of our services and our commitment to best practice.”

– Gaby Amiel, CEO at Sennen

Results

Although software suppliers can make themselves indispensable to their end-users in the selection, adoption and migration of their cloud software, the increasing reliance their clients have on its software means that there is also an increasing demand for resilience.

As a result of Escode’s tailored Escrow as a Service solution, Sennen’s clients gain the reassurance of knowing their applications are protected by the market leader in software escrow and have a full build report for its business-critical infrastructure. Additionally, Sennen have benefited from being able to provide the resilience and assurance that their customers demand through Escode’s range of cloud resilience verification services.