WATS Technical architecture

Our goal is to help bring companies and their partners closer together with software that’s easy to use, easy to integrate, and easy to scale. It starts with ensuring WATS runs smoothly while providing you with a service that scales to meet your ever-changing needs.

As our customers grow and their needs change, the technology has to scale to meet the demand for performance and reliability. WATS is built on an enterprise-level operations and technology architecture hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform.

The following diagram gives an overview of the technical architecture for standard WATS cloud services.

A new WATS customer is assigned to a specific pod in one of the Microsoft Azure data centers - West Europe region (Netherlands), Central US (United States) or Azure East Asia (Hong Kong). Each pod contains all resources necessary to run WATS, including application servers, database servers, and storage, as well as resources for exporting and reporting.

Application services

Each customer has a dedicated web application (portal), hosted on Azure App Service Plans (PaaS). This fully managed platform provides built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching, and scaling. Application creation, updates, and removal (including storage, database, frontend, DNS, etc.) are managed through deployment processes.

Storage

Document Storage: WATS Reports are stored in XML format in an Geo-redundant (GRS) Azure Storage (PaaS) where each customer has a separate container. Azure Storage stores multiple copies of your data to protect against planned and unplanned events, including hardware failures, network/power outages, and natural disasters. Data is synchronously copied three times within the primary region and asynchronously to a secondary region, providing durability of at least 99.99999999999999% (16 nines) over a given year.

Database Storage: Raw reports are transformed into a relational format in Azure SQL Database (PaaS). The SQL Server also serves as storage for a data warehouse for trending analysis. Databases are hosted as single or pooled databases.