OnGres, meaning “On top of PostgreSQL”, is a startup company that specializes in building innovative projects and applications on the PostgreSQL ecosystem for customers around the globe. Its primary focus is on the research and development of products for enterprise deployments, high availability, and advanced PostgreSQL tuning.
IT Services
Industry
TEHAMA ROOMS
Challenges
With their previous IT landscape, OnGres was creating ad-hoc environments in order to allow their teams to access customer environments. The main challenge was that onboarding new customers could take weeks or even months before Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and other security mechanisms were established and approved by customer IT teams.
Additionally, because OnGres lacked proper auditing mechanisms, they were unable to meet some of their customers’ compliance requirements. Combined, these challenges made it difficult for OnGres to sell their service and drove up costs for their customers.
Why Tehama
OnGres originally planned to build their own secure access platform for their customers, but the resource requirements and time-to-market did not meet their standards. The team evaluated other products that had similar functionality but were more focused on the remote connectivity to customer environments, which is only one of the challenges OnGres was trying to solve. They needed comprehensive auditing and compliance capabilities, per request from their customers, and the solutions they evaluated could not meet these expectations.
The Solution
OnGres leveraged Tehama’s virtual workspaces on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver their PostgreSQL Professional Services solution to their customers. With the use of Amazon Workspaces, Tehama is able to introduce a “clean room” concept with virtual workspaces. To achieve this, Tehama creates a lock between corporate networks and the workspaces, with a secure network communication channel. The onboarding process with Tehama was very thorough, with technical presentations and demos led by the Tehama team. Because of this white glove treatment, OnGres was able to roll out Tehama to their first round of customers quickly, and without impacting their day-to-day interactions. Tehama has allowed OnGres to offer their customers 24×7 reactive and proactive PostgreSQL Support, as well as open-scoped consultancy services.
Benefits
The main advantage for OnGres since implementing Tehama is the ease of access to customer environments. Teams no longer have to rely on customer-specific documentation to access each individual environment. Because of this, they spend significantly less time establishing secure connections to their customers. Previously, creating a new connection and onboarding customers would take 3-4 weeks. Now, OnGres has cut this process down to a matter of days. For OnGres, security and auditing were their biggest concerns, and Tehama’s strong auditing capabilities have been able to exceed their expectations and have helped significantly increase their customers’ satisfaction. With screen recording capabilities, customers can now request videos of what the OnGres team does through Tehama on their services, helping them troubleshoot production incidents.
Next Steps
OnGres is continuing to work with the Tehama team, providing feedback and requests for future versions, including specific provisions for PostgreSQL services that will reside within Tehama.
