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Delivering advanced voice biometrics and payment processing solutions requires a high degree of availability and scalability. VoiceTrust turned to eHosting DataFort to help it meet the demands of its Middle East operations.

In the ongoing quest to develop secure financial transactions, there are a number of different technologies that have been deployed, and yet more in the pipeline. One avenue for development is biometrics, an area where VoiceTrust has specialized as a provider of digital payments and voice biometric based identity management solutions.

The company says that the human voice is created by 14 different organs, meaning unique characteristics for each person. Voice-based solutions bring benefits such as no requirement for the user to remember or carry passwords, pins, smart cards and tokens; ease of adoption by the end user; cost-effective deployment of a centralized voice authentication system without need to deploy specific hardware at user locations and a high degree of scalability, which can accommodate a significant increase in end users without addition to the existing infrastructure.

The company's voice verification solutions can be deployed in a number of different models, based on a configurable, extensible and modular platform. In the Middle East, VoiceTrust opted to work with a service provider to handle hosting its solutions, so that it could focus on managing its platforms.

Dr Tariq Habib, CEO, VoiceTrust eServices MENA FZ LLC explained: "VoiceTrust follows a strategy of rolling out supporting IT infrastructure in a way most suited to the target markets we are trying to serve. Generally speaking we focus on managing our platforms in-house and hand over the maintenance of the supporting infrastructure to expert service providers. Taking on from there, we felt that this would be beneficial for us in the UAE as well, as we were starting out with greenfield operations," he added.

At launch VoiceTrust only had a small presence in Dubai, with a solutions-focused team that handled software development, sales and its professional services centre. The company understood the requirements of hosting its services, and that it would require huge capital and human investment up front if it was going to host the solutions itself. Instead, VoiceTrust appointed eHosting DataFort as its hosting partner for the region.

eHDF is hosting payroll and digital payments services for VoiceTrust, and the company expects to add more services for the region in future. eHDF was selected for a number of reasons, including the fact that it was able to deliver on specific uptime requirements, has the scalability to match VoiceTrust' business, and close communications between the two teams.

Habib explained: "eHDF has a clear edge on other service providers with their highly competent team and state of the art monitoring and support environment. Coming from a technology background we were very particular in our requirements and we wanted an equally strong partner that could work with us to the minute detail in building the right setup and maintaining the desired level of quality of service."

"We specifically looked at the existing infrastructure and maturity of standard operating procedures as well as controlled access mechanisms. We also looked at their existing monitoring and support procedures and whether they could support our 99.99% service availability KPI. We also preferred to have the direct interaction with the team. "

eHDF SERVICES TO VOICETRUST

  • Hosting and managing production environment
  • Systems maintenance and monitoring
  • OS level updates
  • Security monitoring
  • Firewalls and load balancing
  • Support resources
  • Redundancy
  • High availability (99.99%)
  • SLA based service delivery and 24x7 support