Achieving Competitive Edge with European Cloud
Hailey HR was founded in 2020 after its founders identified a gap in the market while searching for an HR solution that met their needs. They sought a modern, user-friendly HR system that complied with GDPR but in finding none decided to take things into their own hands.
Hailey HR developed its own modern, user-friendly, and GDPR-compliant HR solution after an unsuccessful search for an existing platform that met these crucial requirements.
As a European Human Resource Management (HRM) platform, adherence to stringent data privacy regulations like GDPR is paramount. This necessitated cloud infrastructure that unequivocally guaranteed data residency within the EU, offered robust encryption and ensured transparent data processing. Specifically, they wanted to find an ISO 27001 certified European provider.
Initially, Hailey utilized an American cloud provider. However, as they began storing an increasing volume of sensitive customer data, a strategic decision was made to transition to European servers, owned and operated by a European company – UpCloud.
This pivotal partnership has been instrumental in Hailey achieving a remarkable 570% annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth over the past two years, maintaining a European client base and ensuring complete data residency within the EU.
“Before working with UpCloud, we were using an American provider, however, that was before our platform handled large amounts of sensitive customer data. Once we began storing more sensitive information, we made the switch to European servers owned by a European company.”
Peter Weibull, Chief Engineer at Hailey HR
Furthermore, in light of the recent shift in the political climate, Hailey further accelerated efforts to migrate all services to UpCloud to become the first HR platform that will run 100% on European-owned cloud.
The migration process began with a proof of concept, running one of Hailey HR’s applications in UpCloud’s development environment for a month, followed by a month in production. This initial phase allowed them to thoroughly evaluate the results. Concluding that the outcomes were promising, Hailey then dedicated a team to systematically move all applications, one by one. Their approach prioritized high quality over strict deadlines, allowing the project to take the necessary time for a successful transition.
Despite thorough planning, challenges inevitably arose during the migration. “We had to come up with new patterns for our serverless applications, and implement those,” Weibull noted. “We also had to closely monitor the resource usage of our applications when deployed to UpCloud, as the new solution handled some aspects differently, for example, with memory usage.”
Although strategy adaptations were made along the way to rectify challenges that arose, UpCloud’s capabilities proved crucial in streamlining and simplifying the migration process.
“UpCloud fits very well into our CI/CD pipelines and we are able to deploy new features seamlessly. The team at UpCloud has also been very responsive during our migration process, and we got assistance when we needed it,” Weibull stated.
He further added, “As for performance, our benchmarks show a noticeable improvement in server response time, 116.67% faster than that of our previous provider, which in turn will benefit our customers.”
Beyond compliance, Hailey also sought advanced technical solutions for scalability. Their preference for Platform as a Service (PaaS) over Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was strategic, allowing their developers to concentrate entirely on enhancing the application rather than diverting focus to infrastructure management. By leveraging UpCloud’s Managed Databases, Hailey’s team could dedicate their efforts to refining the user experience without the burden of server deployment or ongoing maintenance.
The transition to UpCloud’s EU sovereign infrastructure has had a profoundly positive influence on Hailey HR’s daily operations, bolstered their compliance confidence, and significantly shaped their long-term cloud and business strategy.
“The initial response from our customers has been very positive, and many have expressed their enthusiasm, it’s a topic that currently is very relevant, especially for the service we are providing that has a lot of sensitive personal data.”
Peter Weibull, Chief Engineer at Hailey HR
This collaboration has fundamentally allowed Hailey to empower thousands of HR teams to streamline their processes, save valuable time, ensure robust GDPR compliance, and maintain top-tier data security.
Hailey’s success with UpCloud powerfully underscores the increasing importance of data sovereignty and localized cloud solutions for businesses handling sensitive information, aligning perfectly with their long-term growth and potential geographic expansion.
With continued close collaboration and innovation, the team here at UpCloud is excited to see Hailey going from strength to strength and are thrilled to be part of their journey.
Looking to see your business scale like Hailey? With 8 European data centres, get in touch and discover how UpCloud can help your business grow while keeping compliance in check!
