INX: Scalable data sharing

The Client

INX Software is a leader in enabling businesses to safely mobilise workforces and navigate health, safety, and environmental challenges to better protect people and the planet. Their intelligent and responsive software enables their clients to overcome challenges they face operating in complex and fast-paced industries, including resources, energy, utilities and government.

Their global team of industry experts enable their clients transform their businesses into a force for good in the communities they serve.

INX Software puts their clients first, with an ambition to deliver an outstanding experience every time to its 300+ clients, and one million users across the globe.

The Challenge

With emerging requirements to share data in near real time from its products back to clients, and to scale with expected growth, INX Software commissioned a modern data platform.

The platform had to be flexible enough to both facilitate secure and timely data ingestion to clients, while additionally supporting INX Software’s internal data related functions ranging from ingestion, and transformation through to reporting and data science.

Growth is expected to increase an order of magnitude. To avoid burdening the data team to a commensurate increase in workload, and to maximise efficiency, the platform operation had to be simple, and repeatable, employing much automation.

To execute, INX Software engaged with Australia’s leading cloud native consultancy, Mechanical Rock.

The Solution

• Modern multi-tenancy data platform with low operational overhead
• Tenants, and resources, are onboarded through configuration, reducing toil, and aiding business agility
• CI/CD pipelines, and IAC afford comprehensive automation, including circumventing the limitations of Terraform providers
• Automated tests build trust in provisioned resources

High level diagram of INX scalable data sharing

The Benefits

Multi-Purpose Multi-Tenancy Data Platform

Mechanical Rock delivered a flexible modern data platform. It provides mechanisms for clients to securely ingest their data, and simultaneously supports INX Software’s internal data requirements.

Smooth Developer Experience

Broad automation removes repetitive tasks from developers, reducing toil and human error. Onboarding a client from start to deployment had to be completed in days. Our product is designed to do this in a sub-hour experience.

Strong Separation of Client Data

Each client’s data is stored in separate logical containers ensuring isolated tenancy of data and simplifying security.

Verification of Code and Infrastructure

Automatic tests during commits, and after deployment are run to ensure code is compliant, and that all provisioning of resources have been successful after merge, else a rollback occurs.

Restricted Secure Access

The platform integrates with INX Software’s existing identity provider, and a least-privileged Role-Based Access Control model restricts resource access to only the intended clients, or users, in addition to aiding usage attribution.