Founded in 1996, Vista Group started when founder Murray Holdaway was tasked by a global cinema company to produce ticketing software to enhance the cinema experience. The result was ground-breaking technology used by the film industry for distribution and exhibition all around the world.

As a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform provider, Vista Group’s cloud operations team is responsible for ensuring the product works across the globe for its clients, maintaining service infrastructure, and upholding the platform’s reliability. This involves managing numerous resources and ensuring any issues are quickly identified and resolved to avoid disruption to its clients’ global operations.

Determined to continue delivering the services trusted by cinemas and studios across the world, Vista Group realised it needed to move to the cloud to unlock the flexibility and agility it promises while maintaining the company's on-premises infrastructure for resources that demand deeper control and security.

This created a challenge in managing the complexities of a multi-cloud environment, which spurred Vista Group to employ a hybrid platform for simplified management. Vista Group turned to ManageEngine’s comprehensive suite of products, including Site24x7, StatusIQ, DataSecurity Plus, and ADSelfService Plus.

Strong first line of defence
Site24x7 became the cornerstone of Vista Group’s first-line support, with its AppLogs feature playing a pivotal role in alerting the first-line cloud team.

“The query language is so predictive and simple for our consultants to use in AppLogs. From an observability perspective, when we do get an alert, it’s important our consultants can very quickly triage and dig into it to find root cause analysis,” said Vista Group head of cloud operations Andre Potgieter.

This solution also provided Vista Group with host monitoring and alerting across all infrastructure resources. This allows for quick ingestion of new resources and the application of standard alerting profiles across these monitors. This day-to-day functionality enabled global resources to use Site24x7 to triage and investigate Level One support for SaaS customers.

“Site24x7 has host monitoring, which looks after all our infrastructure resources, and more importantly, we now have the ability to very quickly ingest new resources and seamlessly import those for monitoring. We can also apply standard alerting profiles across those monitors,” said Potgieter.

Keeping cybersecurity front-of-mind
DataSecurity Plus was used to ensure compliance by scanning digital resources weekly and generating reports to demonstrate the integrity of executable and configuration files. According to Potgieter, this compliance was crucial for maintaining trust with customers.

Meanwhile, ADSelfService Plus addressed the common issue of password management by enabling customers to reset their passwords through a mobile app, using two-factor authentication for added security. This solution was used both internally and externally for customers.

Streamlined communication
StatusIQ played a key role in customer communication by providing each tenant with its own operational website to monitor platform status and performance. This tool allowed customers to customise their alerts based on specific needs and stay informed about any outages, performance issues, or maintenance schedules.

“Keeping our customers informed about whether the platform is operational and how it is performing is vital. However, many of our customers don’t want to be notified of everything, which can lead to alert fatigue, so we enjoy the customisation ManageEngine allows us to provide to our clients,” said Potgieter.

Vista Group poised for continued growth and success
Implementing ManageEngine solutions brought several benefits to Vista Group, including seamless resource management across multiple environments, proactive issue resolution through comprehensive monitoring and alerting, and assured compliance with regular scans and reports.

Vista Group has seen enhanced customer satisfaction as a result of real-time updates and customisable alerts, while efficient password management has improved security and reduced the workload on support teams.

“It comes down to the relationship for us. Engaging with ManageEngine was an initial leap of faith, and we are extremely happy. What’s kept us with ManageEngine, and will for much longer, is ManageEngine’s technical ability, local support, and the personal service we receive,” said Potgieter.