Escrow London awarded AWS SaaS Escrow contract with the Department for Education (DfE)

London, May 16, 2019 – Escrow London today announced that it has been awarded a contract with the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) division of the Department for Education to protect a critical SaaS hosted application within the organisation.

The application went live with the STA in 2012 as an on-premise solution. As time progressed, the software vendor transitioned from an on-premise solution to a SaaS based model.

The DfE identified the SaaS hosted application as a potential risk within the organisation and published a tender for a SaaS escrow business continuity solution to mitigate against the software vendor going bankrupt or ceasing its operations. The scope of the SaaS escrow includes source code deposits, regular database deposits, continuity within AWS (Amazon Web Services), detailed build documentation and vendor financial monitoring.

SaaS Release Verification

As part of the project, Escrow London will be tasked with performing a Full Verification of the source code to ensure that the supplied code can be compiled into the working application in addition to a SaaS Release verification to provide assurance that the application and database can be deployed to an independent AWS environment.

The DfE opted for a Vendor Financial Monitoring service. Through this provision, the SaaS vendor’s AWS invoices are monitored by Escrow London for any irregularity in payments or service. Non-payment of invoices to critical suppliers can be used as an early indication of financial difficulty of a SaaS vendor.

The award of this contract falls under the G-Cloud 10 framework that facilitates the Crown Commercial Service procurement of technology with the ability to deploy quickly and effectively through pre-approved commercial arrangements. Escrow London was welcomed into the G-Cloud 10 framework last year as one of only two UK-based software escrow vendors and the first software escrow vendor on the platform to support automatic deposits directly from Git repositories such as GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab and Azure Devops.

Evan Lever, CEO of Escrow London, said “Escrow London is delighted to have been selected by the Department for Education for this critical project. It is evident that there has been a dramatic increase in SaaS applications being adopted by public sector organisations. This creates a new challenge for these organisations to ensure that they have adequate continuity plans in place. The SaaS escrow solutions from Escrow London that primarily cover AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are an integral component used to support these public sector organisations in adopting SaaS hosted applications. Together with our team of source code experts and AWS Certified solution architects, we look forward to supporting the DfE and the STA with our creative SaaS continuity escrow solutions.”

Visit Escrow London website to learn more about creative AWS and other cloud escrow solutions.