UCO Platform's benefits for business: story from the 12 SMEs

After almost a year, 12 SMEs have completed their journey with the UCO Platform developed by the H2020 project UNICORN.

The 12 SMEs from different parts of Europe have been chosen among numerous competitors through the UNICORN validation contest Open Call. The chosen SMEs have been asked to use UCO Platform, while developing their own products, and report their feedback.

The UCO Platform is a DevOps as Service platform that aims to simplify the design, deployment and management of secure and elastic by design, multi-cloud applications. It has been tested in twelve use cases with diverse applications aiming at different sectors: gaming industry, e-health, smart cities, business coaching, etc. In all instances, our twelve validators have achieved fascinating results with the UCO Platform! And here are some of the key benefits that the twelve companies pointed out:

1. Fast deployment and shorter time to market - no more financial losses due to wasted resources and long development time! Belgian SME Sirus claimed that the main advantage of UNICORN is '<..> faster deploy time of a full application stack: higher level abstraction for application development enabled a faster and more reusable solution setup'. For all SMEs, it took no more than 10 minutes to deploy a new instance (e.g., for PixelRam & Aniway - only 4 min!), while Italian Inobeta claimed UCO shortened their instance deployment time from 10 to 7 min. 
2. More security - UCO's continuous monitoring increases security without any additional effort! This feature was highly appreciated by the HOPU company: 'UCO, thanks to its features, allowed self-climbing services and the increased security. <...>UCO provided strong protection against attacks while also observing the state of the resources of the machines that contain the deployed services.' It-labs also claimed that 'design of the UCO Platform enables applications to better protect private and sensitive data. UCOs privacy-preserving ruling enables detection of unwanted data extraction. It allows easier securing of web-applications with standard-procedures that are automatically taken care of.'
3. Better scalability and no data loss - the Greek BioAssist claimed that UCO Platform simplified devops operations and more importantly - improved app scalability and monitoring. Meanwhile, Inobeta added 'the particular advantage of UCO was a possibility to detect a scaleup situation during a peak time, so it can satisfy the huge traffic earlier'. LSTech was content with no data losses which appeared after increasing traffic up to 10 times!
4. Possibility to avoid vendor lock-in allows to bypass high switching costs and chose the most desired cloud service provider. Here, Inobeta claimed that 'UCO provides an opportunity to avoid vendor lock-in and satisfy customer’s need to deploy applications on several cloud providers'.  Finnish Aniway added that UCO 'gives the possibility for cost efficiency in using the most appropriate cloud vendor at any given time'.

Visit UNICORN page and check more update.