GAP is an award-winning communications platform – built specifically to connect, protect and optimise (almost) anything on the planet. Our platform equips our global partners with tools for location tracking, emergency alerting, message routing and much more. In a world of rapid technological innovation and ever-changing standards, the ability to interoperate between messaging systems is an increasing problem. Being able to automatically translate from one message format to another without user intervention is what makes GAP unique.
GAP is a device independent hub for messaging devices and acts as a gateway to terrestrial messaging systems as well as social network platforms. Our hub can transform and route messages to any destination. GAP also exposes an Application Programming Interface (API) for integration into third party systems.
Powered by Microsoft Azure, GAP has been designed from scratch to provide near limitless scalability, high availability and integrity. Distributed across a network of globally inter-connected data centres, GAP provides a secure way to globally route messages between devices, corporate systems, search and rescue authorities and personal end points.
Balancing usability with innovation The GAP roadmap is formed in part by our partners and in part by our team. We carefully balance usability with innovation to deliver cutting-edge features and continuous improvements to our platform and applications. We listen to the requirements and aspirations of the market and develop technology in a simple and intuitive manner to deliver real business value.
Robust foundations With every new feature that we develop, we ensure that it works with the standardised concepts in the system so that it brings maximum benefit to the entire ecosystem. New features that we add to our apps, are intuitive and follow the same behaviours and design that you’d find in all our applications. Our “out of the box” solutions use standard, configurable concepts and require minimal set-up.
Non-stop, nimble dev Our roadmap is flexible so that we can adapt to the changing technology landscape. Our nimble approach means that we can respond to the needs of our users much quicker than other providers in the market. We work to a 6 week release cycle; delivering continuous improvements and new features on a regular basis. Our product roadmap is always planned 12 months in advance, with releases pencilled in along the way, allowing us to re-prioritise as and when we need. We do not commit to fixed dates of feature releases against the roadmap as we’re often exploring uncharted ground in our development where sometimes things can become more and more complex as we delve deeper.
Sprinting towards the future Two10degrees utilises an agile development methodology (based on Scrum). Work is broken down into monthly “sprints”. The work items in each sprint are selected by the Development Team from the product backlog in consultation with the Product Owner at a monthly sprint planning session. The Development Team then meets daily to discuss their progress, plan upcoming work and remove any impediments. At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is performed, where the Development Team demonstrates the work they’ve undertaken to key internal stakeholders and ideas for future work are discussed. Finally, a sprint retrospective meeting is held where the Development Team assesses the work they performed in the sprint and discusses ideas for future improvements to be implemented in the next sprint.
GAP in the cloud
Microsoft Azure Powered by Microsoft Azure®, Microsoft’s cloud computing offering, the Global Alerting Platform has been designed from scratch to provide near limitless scalability, high availability and integrity. Distributed across a network of globally inter-connected datacentres, GAP provides a secure way to globally route messages between satellite based messaging devices, corporate systems, search and rescue authorities and personal end points.
Scalability Using the ‘compute on demand’ features of Microsoft Azure, GAP allows for dynamic changes in traffic load ensuring there is always sufficient compute power to cope with growth. Additional compute power can be provisioned at the 'press of a button'. The underlying software has been architected to be horizontally scalable, meaning it scales linearly with increased compute power.
Availability One of the main advantages provided by the platform is robust availability based on extensive redundancy achieved with virtualisation technology. GAP provides numerous levels of redundancy to provide maximum availability of customers data. Data is replicated to three separate nodes within the platform to minimise the impact of hardware failures.
Customers can leverage the geographically distributed nature of the platform infrastructure by creating a multiple accounts to provide hot-failover capability. In such a scenario, customers may create custom roles to replicate and synchronise data between datacentres.
Confidentiality Confidentiality ensures that a customer's data is only accessible by authorised entities. GAP provides confidentiality via the following mechanisms:
Isolation – Beyond authenticating access to data, compute and storage elements are logically or physically separate.
Encryption - Used internally within the platform for protecting control channels and is provided optionally for customers who need rigorous data protection capabilities.
Identity and Access Management - Ensures that only properly authenticated entities are allowed access.
Monitoring The platform has multiple levels of monitoring and integrity checking. Each compute node has a monitoring agent that monitors the health of the virtual machine (VM) node on which it runs. If the agent fails to respond, the platform reboots the VM. In case of hardware failure, the platform automatically creates a new hardware node and reprograms the network configuration to restore the service to full availability. GAP On-Premise Although it is not part of our standard offering, it is possible to deploy our platform on-premise (to your internal data centres / servers).
