Infrastructure

Maintaining high availability

Loftware develops Loftware Cloud on Microsoft’s reliable Azure platform, ensuring world-class infrastructure and availability.

Your Service Level Agreement guarantees high service availability as defined in your Master Software Subscription and Services Agreement.

Loftware Cloud architecture prioritizes high availability and eliminates single points of failure with multiple redundancies. We work in collaboration with Microsoft architects to build Loftware Cloud following best practices. Microsoft features Loftware Cloud in their global catalogue of Azure-based solutions.

You can find Loftware Cloud on Appsource and the Azure Marketplace.

Loftware Cloud web availability

Loftware builds reliability and redundancy into our cloud-based web architecture.

Loftware Cloud websites run on clusters of virtual machines (nodes). Each node runs within different Availability Zones (separate physical locations within Azure data centers). If a node fails, the cluster continues to operate on other nodes.

Loftware Cloud runs on several clusters. In the event of a large-scale whole-cluster failure, we can migrate your Loftware Cloud accounts to different clusters.

Redundancies and backups

Loftware Cloud leverages Azure to provide high availability for your applications and data.

Your data is hosted on redundant database servers to ensure no service interruptions. If one database server fails, another database server takes over (seamless service).

Azure performs database backups and stores copies of each backup in multiple physical locations. We can restore your data from any time in the previous 30 days from server backups. Loftware Cloud creates full backups every week, differential backups every 12 hours, and transaction log backups every 5-10 minutes.

Printing offline

Uninterrupted label printing is Loftware Cloud’s most mission-critical process.

In case of interruptions, Loftware Cloud allows you to print from applications on your computers without connecting to Loftware Cloud backend in Azure. With system configuration, you can print in offline mode for up to 5 days. Loftware Cloud automatically synchronizes your printing records from offline printing.

	Note
	We recommend running Loftware Cloud on reliable internet connections. Offline printing requires you to configure your system to rely on your local cache, and is limited to cached labels and locally available data. Loftware’s professional services team can design or advise you on best practice solution configurations for offline printing.

Assessing and mitigating risk

RISK	MITIGATION
SERVICE OVERLOAD	We monitor performance data. In the event of poor performance, we scale out resources or move you to another web server.
SYSTEM DATABASE FAILURE	We geo-replicate the system database in another location. In the event of system database failure, your system automatically switches to a geo-replicated copy after 1 hour. The system database also has point-in-time backups for the previous 30 days, so in the event of data corruption, we can restore the data.
USER DATABASE FAILURE	User database has geo-replicated point-in-time backups for the previous 30 days. In the event of data corruption or loss, we can restore user data.
AUTHENTICATION FAILURE	Your providers (Microsoft, Google) are responsible for service availability. In the event of authentication not working properly (i.e. bugs) Loftware cooperates with providers to resolve issues.
WEB SERVER FAILURE	All websites run on multiple nodes (clusters). If one node fails, another takes over.
DATA CENTER FAILURE	Handled by PaaS provider (Microsoft Azure). In the event of data center failures, Loftware contacts Microsoft (support request) to resolve issues. If Microsoft doesn’t resolve issues or promptly provide estimated restoration times, Loftware restores services in another data center.
DNS FAILURE	Microsoft guarantees 100% DNS services availability.