Geo-Redundancy: The Future of Reliable Service Solutions

Among the many achievements 1GLOBAL has accomplished, one of our less publicized but no less important wins was the GSMA SAS SM Certification of 1GLOBAL's Amsterdam remote SIM provisioning site. 

Despite the logistical challenges that presented themselves over the course of a complicated year, 1GLOBAL was able to overcome all the necessary hurdles and in 2020 fully certified its second site. 

1GLOBAL's Senior Technical Product Manager Stanislav Slavkov provided the following insights about remote SIM provisioning technology...   

What are the GSMA specifications?

The GSMA Embedded SIM Specification provides a single, effective, standardized method for over-the-air provisioning of an initial operator subscription, and the ability to switch subscriptions from one operator to another to accelerate the market growth of eSIM and make the transition as secure as possible. 

Part of the core standard set by the GSMA is the Security Accreditation Scheme (SAS) which preserves the unification of embedded SIMs with remote provisioning capabilities. There are two parts to the GSMA SAS certification: 

Firstly, SAS-UP, which ensures that the UICC and eUICCs are produced in a secure location and that all sensitive data is managed securely. 

The second is SAS-SM, a scheme through which SM-SR, SM-DP, SMDP+ and SM-DS platform providers subject their sites to a security audit. Essentially, the purpose of the audit is to ensure that these providers have sufficient security measures in place to protect the interests of operators. 

Why, when a service provider has a certified site, are multiple sites needed? 

Firstly, global legislation varies from country to country when it comes to hosting Remote SIM Provisioning sites, so the user’s data stays within their home country. Having multiple sites can resolve this puzzle and operators can avoid the major investment of setting up dedicated sites within their premises. 

For 1GLOBAL, the main objective for the certification was the ability to offer its customers a geo-redundant solution. We are constantly evolving to serve the best interests of our customers by improving our services from an availability, redundancy and resilience perspective. 

What does geo-redundancy mean for our existing and upcoming customers? 

A geo-redundant solution makes sure service is available for 1GLOBAL customers in the event of any unexpected outages, whether this is hardware or software failures, emergency maintenance or even natural disasters. Should an unforeseen event like this happen, 1GLOBAL’s service availability is guaranteed by activating our secondary site from a passive to active mode in a fully automated procedure. This ensures that there is no loss of service, which is very useful in a PaaS model. 

This ‘fail-over’ process works without any human intervention. It works simply by identifying the outage in real-time with the help of multiple health checkers running on the platform. Once the health checker has identified the issue as an outage, all traffic is routed to the secondary site which will serve customer needs without any service disruption. 

As with everything we champion here at 1GLOBAL, it just works. 

To find out how you can benefit from our geo-redundant solution, please get in touch with us.