SaaS stands for Software as a Service and in a nutshell means that you access and use software online via any internet connection. You don't have any software to install, no costly or specific IT infrastructure to buy; you simply pay a monthly fee.

This means we can deliver all the benefits of a large IT department, state of the art hardware and years of product development to your business at a fraction of the cost. Delivering solutions from our remote data centre via the Internet, SaaS saves time, effort and money by simplifying system reliability and support, whilst adding value in the form of operational flexibility and guaranteed system performance.

Our SaaS approach ensures that business-critical applications can be deployed in a cost-effective, scalable, secure and risk-reducing manner.

4Projects use the SaaS approach to provide you with a viable alternative to procuring and implementing complex IT systems. We are able to control more precisely the total cost of ownership through subscription-based monthly payments. Information processing is performed off-site by 4Projects allowing you to focus on areas of core expertise.

The benefits of using 4Projects SaaS model are simple:

• Rapid response: switching on new applications/functionality is instantaneous and immediately benefits all users.
• Shared knowledge: lessons learnt from other users/clients are constantly fed back into the core systems to ensure the best possible functionality is always delivered directly to users.
• Focus: you can focus critical resources on core business functions, letting 4Projects take the technical strain out of Project Management.
• Experience: we use our construction, business and IT experience to implement best practice levels of availability, security, backup, disaster recovery and support.
• Cost Reduction: the SaaS model reduces fixed costs and lowers overall expenditure on hardware, applications and management.
• No capital expenditure: with the monthly invoicing model, no upfront expenditure is required on software or hardware, allowing your business to balance and manage the cost of the extranet throughout the duration of a project.
• Remote access and control: project managers and administrators have the ability to access the project application from anywhere in the world, `switching on’ new users and applications as and when the need arises.
• Complete confidence: by removing the need for you to host your own data, we take away the risk of allowing external users’ access to your servers, with the consequent danger of compromising data and confidential information.

The integrity and security of your data is vital to you. We know that, and therefore we continue to invest heavily in secure, robust, reliable systems architecture. Information and documents residing within the 4Projects solution are available securely 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

By deploying the 4Projects solution, you can eliminate the risk of information loss through network failures, email virus or server hardware faults. Our SaaS solution allows you the peace of mind that all information is fully available, fully secure and fully backed-up for the duration of the project – and well into the future.

The 4Projects hosting facilities are physically secure, authentication of users is highly sophisticated, and the software solution itself provides a high degree of flexibility, providing either full open collaboration, tightly controlled security, or a balance between the two. Strict measures are in place to monitor and counter denial of service and virus attacks.

N-tier Architecture
To protect clients’ data, an absolute minimum of the extranet application is available on the Internet. Those parts of the system that are by necessity available are extremely secure. The only parts of the 4Projects extranet directly available over the Internet are those that format the web pages for your browser and handle requests you send back. All other communications and the application login itself are kept behind a ‘firewall’ layer. To further secure your data, the database is surrounded with an additional layer of security, achieved by putting the server onto a complete different network, which is inaccessible from the Internet.  Access to the database requires additional levels of authentication and can only be achieved via the web application. The 4Projects security layers are referred to as a ‘gatekeeper’ system.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
4Projects utilise SSL technology to ensure that data passing between the web browser and the server is encrypted.

System Integrity
Every file uploaded to the extranet is automatically checked by anti-virus software and once uploaded is held in a 'read only' format, which can never be altered or overwritten. Our system is built using n-tier architecture and at the heart of the system is a Microsoft SQL database. When a user uploads a file it is stored not in a file system on a server, but directly in the database as a binary object. The contents of the files uploaded to the project extranet cannot be altered in any way, ensuring that the content of files downloaded from the site will be identical to those previously uploaded. 

Keeping the Service available 24x7
The 4Projects hosting environment has been designed to have no “single point of failure”.  All major server and network components are configured in N+1 arrangement, and the servers are clustered to provide failover and load-balancing capabilities. Clustering allows more resource to be provisioned at short notice through the addition of additional servers.  All components of the system are designed for high-availability data-centre environments, and are rated for the increasing demands of 4Projects’ business. All servers use hot-swap SCSI disks, RAID configurations, redundant power supplies and UPS. Complementing the hardware infrastructure is a manned 24x7x365 pre-emptive monitoring service, and 4 hour on-site support contracts with hardware vendors.

4Projects solution is a true multi-tenant SaaS solutions. What does it mean and why is it so important?

Multi-tenant SaaS means that we have one version of software which sits on our secure servers. Each of our clients extranets sit, securely separated, on this single copy of the software; each getting as big a slice as they need. Other providers operate single-tenant SaaS. This means they duplicate their software so each client has their own version.

The advantages of one version of software with multi-tenants are many.

• Future proof. All software enhancements are made once - all clients and all users always have the latest version at all times.
• 4Projects support provide the same support for every single 4Projects user around the world.
• New developments and functionality are made available to everyone - everybody benefits from everybody's input.
• Because we only have one version of the software to update, it means our development team focus on enhancements and development. This means you get more new releases and a continually improving product.
• If a bug is found, it is fixed just once, and quickly.
• All users benefit from the same strictest security regime demanded by the most security concious clients.