MPI – Software as a Service

The MPI from 3DSecureMPI offered as a hosted solution significantly reduces the cost of running a 3DSecure infra structure. 3DSecureMPI.com combines its expertise in high availability software hosting to provide a fast, reliable and cost effective solution.

The idea that the network was the computer was proposed as early as a decade ago, with companies like Sun and Microsoft championing the idea. This idea has continued to evolve and key technologies have in the meantime taken centre stage such as Cloud Computing and Virtualization. Virtualization frees the O/S from the hardware, allowing the same hardware to support multiple operating systems and to move entire systems around without having to worry about hardware dependencies. Cloud computing takes this idea one step further, promising to free applications from the operating system; Google’s cloud offering in particular, proposes application hosting.

The cost benefits of this approach are clear enough. Maintaining hardware, operating systems, web servers, databases etc consumes a huge amount of resources – try to push the reliability over 99.9%, scale the applications horizontally in a fault tolerant distributed environment and the costs and effort involved become prohibitive.

It is also a fact that many of the internet technologies we use today have continued to increase in sophistication and this sophistication has come at the cost of ever increasing complexity. At the same time, competition is fierce in a market place that is truly global. Companies now have to be more focused on getting their product quickly to market and more resources must be dedicated to market acquisition. The need to have an excellent technical product does not go away; if a company can find a reliable partner that contributes to its technical excellence, without the need to be distracted by obscure technical details, then that company has the edge.

This brings us to the MPI offered by 3dSecureMPI.com. The MPI can be installed onsite or it can be delivered as a service. The function of the MPI is perfectly suited to be delivered as a service. What is equally important is that 3dSecureMPI has over a decade delivered high availability services over the internet – 3dSecureMPI is not a traditional software vendor setup to sell software that clients would then have to worry about installing, maintaining and upgrading. 3dSecureMPI runs applications hosted on its infrastructure, offering its applications as a service. This also means that 3dSecureMPI is able to profile and enhance its products in a real world environment. The advantage of collecting information about software in a real world environment can never be matched by software testing in a lab approach adopted by the traditional software vendors. Clearly 3dSecureMPI can provide a custom install at a client’s site, but the client sacrifices the many benefits of using the software as a service.

This being the card industry, there is also the added complexity of getting PCI approval for the onsite installation, an important responsibility that must be taken seriously, but which ultimately adds significant costs which do not contribute to the success of the company in the market place.

Companies considering using the MPI should therefore give a preference to using the MPI as a hosted solution and provisioning this service from 3dSecureMPI will give an additional level of quality, reliability and ultimately a significant business advantage.