How KoLab moved a Cook Islands superannuation app from Google Cloud to SiteHost

There are companies where job titles and hierarchies matter, and then there are companies like KoLab. Even just getting Ben Carson, Technical Director, and Sarah Rennie, Director of Strategy, to confirm the right words for this sentence results in good-natured confusion as they check what to call each other. They’re obviously very used to working closely together.

I’m talking with Ben and Sarah (a second Ben, Managing Director Ben Rennie, couldn’t make it) about a recent project that brought KoLab and SiteHost together in the service of the Cook Island National Superannuation Fund (CINSF).

But before we get to the islands, meet KoLab. Sarah says that KoLab’s difference comes straight from its three co-founders. “The coolest thing is that Ben, Ben, and I all come from quite different backgrounds with specific skillsets.”

It’s as much about what they aren’t as what they are. As Sarah says:

We’re not an agency, not a vendor. We help businesses to make smarter digital decisions. Our angle is human-centered and very much about adding value through every step of the journey, not just reaching an outcome.

CINSF brought in KoLab to help design the future of their core application, and soon saw the tangible value in working with the right “digital thought partner”.

Over more than a year the project team unpicked some suboptimal code, put a lot more control in the client’s hands, and significantly reduced infrastructure bills with a migration from Google Cloud to SiteHost. That would be impressive enough, but they achieved all of this as the app’s developer made a surprise exit and the client went through a change of leadership.

Asked what situations KoLab’s clients are typically in when they first engage, Ben traces a line graph in the air. From left to right, one hand tracks upwards and the other downwards. His eyes narrow knowingly as his hands cross over.

He says, “A common example is clients who have seen good results early on from a vendor. If you have no in-house technical expertise, this is a really high-trust relationship. But if billing starts going up while deliverables start going down, you might start to wonder about some of the advice that you’ve been getting.”

Sarah adds that things don’t have to be going wrong for KoLab to add value.

“Sometimes it's more about making a big investment or implementing a new strategy,” she says. “Before you jump in, it’s time to step back and look at things in the wider business context: what do we have and what do we actually need? Let's make sure we're making that right decision before we go into the next stage of our tech development.”

CINSF were taking on big technical change, one of those major implementations that Sarah described. But they soon exemplified Ben’s story of vendor troubles, too.

A crucial part of the nation’s financial ecosystem

The app that CINSF brought to the table is the fund’s employer portal. “Typically, end users are employers logging in to submit payroll information from which super contributions are determined. Superannuation fund administrators also use it to upload identity documentation, and to verify fund membership. It is operating as their source of truth,” Ben says.

This source of truth consists of a hosted API and a clientside web app/frontend. Employer filings, amongst other things, are posted through direct integration with New Zealand’s stock exchange, NZX.

During COVID the system also became the platform for what Ben calls “stipends or payments” to citizens. He says, “My understanding is that it was the biggest digital record of Cook Island citizens when the pandemic hit. A lot of work was done on it then.”

In short, this is a very important piece of an entire nation’s financial plumbing.

After a careful start, an unexpected pivot

When KoLab and CINSF partnered up, the developers of the employer portal had some bad news.

Ben says, “The existing vendor had flagged the fact that API framework versions and clientside libraries were out of date. They proposed resolutions that were considerable pieces of work, in terms of scale and price. There’s no doubt that something had to be done, but our view was that the issue was less time sensitive than the client had been led to believe.”

In situations like these, KoLab’s role is to allow their clients the space and time to make good decisions, and to advise on some of the larger questions at play. Did the proposal in front of CINSF fit the organisation’s strategy? What was the best path forward? Sarah explains:

You save a lot in the long run, almost by slowing down to speed up. Let’s understand what the needs are, and what the capacity or capability is within the building. Let’s think through things that might happen in other parts of the business or down the track, as well as today’s pain points. 

“We did some initial workshopping with the current vendor and the NZX to understand what the current state and future state might look like.”

An early decision was to change the management of the infrastructure under the app. When KoLab first approached SiteHost the plan was to retain Google Cloud Platform but shift its billing and management from the vendor to us. (Managing hyperscale cloud instances is one of our lesser-known enterprise solutions.) This would solve problems that stemmed from the way that the original vendor had structured things. 

“All of the infrastructure and systems were fully integrated within the vendor’s environment. This limited our client’s autonomy. While they covered the ongoing costs they didn’t actually hold ownership over, or have direct access to, the codebase or infrastructure. As a result, they were exposed to significant dependency risk. If the vendor relationship ever changed, they would have had very little operational control,” Ben says.

“By sitting on Google Cloud and running business-as-usual for three to six months, everybody could get familiar. We’d have time to develop our understanding of the system and things like the cadence of customers raising bugs and issues, for example.”

But those months never happened.

“Not very long into this process, CINSF raised a support ticket with the app’s developer. Their response made it clear that their support capacity was lower than it had been, and lower than CINSF needed. The business had changed,” Ben says.

The project adapted smartly, helped by KoLab’s calm, quick and confident approach to curveballs. One big strategic decision expedited the move from Google Cloud Platform to SiteHost Cloud Containers. CINSF would gain control over the hosting account for the first time, and the application would be decoupled from the cloud platform controlled by the original vendor.

A new home: SiteHost Cloud Containers

Through another company, Ben has been a SiteHost customer for years. So when he recommended us he knew what, and who, he was talking about.

When I first shifted to SiteHost, I sat in a room with [SiteHost Technical Director] Quintin and was super impressed by the whole operation. I think it was as you were launching Cloud Containers [2016]. I was just really impressed by being able to go and get face-to-face with someone, which makes a big difference. I've dealt with Quintin a fair bit throughout the course of that relationship.

Despite Ben’s familiarity, KoLab and SiteHost will be at an arm’s length, for good reasons.

“We encouraged the client to own the relationship with SiteHost and pay for their infrastructure directly. Whilst we hope that we’ll maintain our relationship with them, if it happens to go south then they’ll still own the accounts and infrastructure.

“It's a high level of transparency and it gives them the comfort of knowing that if anything goes wrong they could find another developer, for example. That new developer would have no problem accessing the resources they need,” Ben says.

Sarah notes the strategic win for the client. “We mitigated this really big risk that they’d been living with.

“This goes to the core value of KoLab. It isn't about raking it all in and seeing what we can get out of the client. It's setting them up for success, with or without us. We want customers to have an amazing experience with us, and with SiteHost we knew our client would be in safe hands. Your human-centred approach was a core value alignment,” Sarah says.

Today the app is sitting on fully managed Cloud Containers. Ben explains why:

The managed component was really important for us, and for the Super Fund to have the peace of mind of knowing that the infrastructure is not going to go down in the middle of the night. That service being 24/7 is important too. The reality is that they weren't going to find an on-island vendor, and with New Zealand or Australia there are time zone considerations. A 24/7 operation with SiteHost means that nights or weekends are covered no matter what.

The client is also paying a lot less than they were. Ben and Sarah confidently predict significant savings of 50-60%, even after allowing for possibly scaling up Cloud Container resources in the future. The project team is still observing traffic loads and learning what peaks will look like. They never had certainty about the loading of the previous system, although Ben suspects it was overengineered.

A year to prepare

The project that migrated the app from Google Cloud to SiteHost lasted about a year. “We operate fairly visually, with diagrams of project stages and stage gates to work through. It wasn't about the rush, it was about getting things right and letting the customer know that everything’s in the open and they’re in really safe hands,” Sarah says.

Some hold-ups were beyond KoLab’s control. With the original vendor still involved at times, scheduling difficulties were hard to avoid. There were other complicating factors, too.

“We had new leadership start in the Cook Islands. We had to fit in with their timing as they got ready to go. Their preparations meant that we’d find little risks that popped up. We’d tell them what those risks are, how we could mitigate them, and give them options,” Sarah says.

On the tech side of the project, Ben was also looking at things through a risk lens.

He says, “There was a lot of pre-work and a few moving parts, like how the app integrates directly with NZX wealth technologies. If something had gone wrong, and suddenly those submissions weren’t being made and people’s superannuation contributions weren’t happening, that’s a real tangible impact which would be quite complex to come back from.”

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Working through the app’s code base, Ben found “a fair bit of hard coding to Google Cloud”, not all of it in areas where you’d usually expect to find such close ties to any environment. 

“We made sure that nothing was too tightly coupled to Google Cloud so that those filings, for example, weren't going to be an issue. It was easy enough to pick up pieces of code and decouple them. A lot of it was just being diligent, and testing as well as we could. We spun up a test environment just to prove a handful of use cases before we even moved to having true UAT and production environments,” Ben says.

“We're adding value by leaving the customer with a code base that’s much easier to pick up and move again, if they ever wanted to shift to different infrastructure.”

This was an area where members of the SiteHost team got involved.

“Working with SiteHost was really great for me, shifting some of our workload across. While none of us were familiar with the code base I could offer a little bit of additional insight where it was needed. It was a really simple process, really cohesive. That was awesome from our perspective. It became lighter-touch than we had expected because of the support we got from SiteHost.”

Meanwhile, the production version of the app couldn’t be ignored. Even as the migration project was underway, KoLab and CINSF kept seeing why they’d chosen a good path.

Ben says, “We had an emergency solution with the original vendor, who had a developer working on contract. As it transpires, a lot of the support tickets being raised were about fixing stuff in Google Cloud as opposed to the app. They didn't have a DevOps team, though, they had a developer trying to find fixes in the Google Cloud Platform. That reinforced what we'd told the client, which is to leave infrastructure to the infrastructure people. Especially when it’s national level infrastructure!”

This also validated the decision to involve SiteHost in preparing the app for migration. Through that experience, “there's now knowledge that you bring to our client’s vendor relationship with you”, Ben says.

The migrated version of the employer portal is easier for the client to understand as well. Ben says, “Before, nothing was documented. It was very unclear how we would even trigger deployments! We didn't want them to end up in this situation again.

“We documented as much as possible. Going through this process, with your team giving us more support than we had originally planned, means that should there be any issue there’s now some expertise sitting inside SiteHost as well. If I get hit by a bus, my colleagues or CINSF will know where to go to effectively fill those knowledge gaps.”

Moving day

The ultimate proof of KoLab’s careful, thoughtful slow-down-to-speed-up approach came on the day that the application went live on SiteHost infrastructure.

Ben says, “We had our comprehensive schedule with all our milestones, and we had updates come through on the minute from Harry. All I had to do was coordinate that messaging from him to CINSF.

“A message would come through from Harry, saying that they had pulled the trigger on a given stage. Big tick, everybody's happy, and we're on to the next stage."

It's pretty telling that we were able to migrate a national infrastructure project, one where I'd set aside the weekend to coordinate it, and I did everything that I had to do just on my phone.

Sarah was one of the people seeing the updates that Ben shared.

“In that transition week we connected everyone through a WhatsApp group. We treated it like a really human communication experience: ‘Now we're doing this, now we're doing that’. There were so many happy reactions throughout it all. Things couldn't have gone any better,” she says.

“As the non-tech person in the whole process just watching it happen, it just felt so smooth and like nothing was ever too much. Any bumps were smoothed out at pace. The actual transition weekend literally could not have gone any better.”

With the app running on Cloud Containers and the old vendor relationship in the rear vision mirror, KoLab has helped CINSF see a more human-centred way to manage technology. 

When Sarah describes Google Cloud as “a thing”, the vagueness is intentional. By comparison, she says, “it's nice to know the SiteHost is more local, with actual humans attached to it and similar values. I think that for our customers in the Pacific, those values align. It does create some comfort.

“That's key, right? We want to lean into tech being a human experience and recognise the advantages that the human experience can have for our clients. Working with SiteHost, it just feels like a business that’s on the same plane. You're real people offering up real solutions and with a customer service level that aligns. So nothing was too much, which is exactly the experience that we want our customers to feel.”