About Ontime
Ontime is a fintech startup that helps people to pay their bills on time, every time. Ontime lets users pay their bills straight from their wages and aims to make managing money simple – taking away the pain and frustration that money can bring. It takes client privacy seriously and uses bank-level security measures to project their data.
The Challenge
For Ontime, handling recurring, time-sensitive, financial transactions meant continuous data backup wasn’t just a ‘nice to have’. It was essential so the startup could:
- Maintain transaction integrity: Ontime processes salary deductions to settle bills promptly, so safeguarding transaction data is critical. By using continuous backups theyestablish a strong safety net that preserves complete and accurate transaction records.
- Uptime and Operational Reliability: Preventing disruptions and data loss is essential to maintaining consistent service availability. On payday, users expect Ontime to execute bill payments without fail; by maintaining continuous data backups they proactively reduce the likelihood of service-impacting incidents, helping to ensure that critical payment workflows remain reliable and uninterrupted.
- Regulatory & Financial Safeguards: Ontime partners with regulated firms that mandate strong financial controls, including consistent data protection and recovery mechanisms. Backups are part of compliance and audit readiness.
- User Confidence & Reputation Protection: Proactively preventing data loss is essential to avoiding scenarios where users are unable to complete critical tasks, such as paying bills. Through automated, continuous backups, Ontime reduces the likelihood of data corruption or loss before it can impact users, helping to prevent service disruption and sustain confidence in Ontime.
- Fraud Protections & Dispute Resolution: Fraud Protection and Dispute Resolution: Automated, continuous backups provide a reliable source of truth for tracing and validating transactions. By preserving accurate historical records, Ontime can proactively support fraud detection and streamline the investigation of anomalies, enabling faster, evidence-based resolution of issues.
The Solution
To overcome these challenges, Automat-it built a secure, multi-account AWS environment, known as Landing Zone, with a focus on data protection and backups.
Open to see image below in more details
Specifics of the solution include:
- Centralized backup orchestration: AWS Backup enabled a single pane of control across all accounts in the Landing Zone. Backup plans defined at the organizational unit (OU) level automatically extended protection to new accounts and tagged resources, ensuring policy consistency without manual setup.
- Broad Service Coverage: Core services like RDS, DynamoDB, EBS, EC2, S3, and DocumentDB are covered under unified backup plans, reducing operational complexity and ensuring compliance.
- Consistent and Reliable Recovery: The combination of scheduled and continuous backups ensures data consistency—especially for transaction-heavy workloads—and enables rapid recovery when needed.
- Disaster Recovery & Isolation: With cross-account and cross-region backup copies, Ontime now benefits from enhanced disaster recovery posture and logical isolation of backups from primary workloads.
- Immutable, Encrypted Backup Records: KMS encryption secures backups at rest, while maintaining an immutable audit trail that supports internal reviews and regulatory compliance.
- Audit-Ready Posture with Visibility: Integration with AWS Backup Audit Manager, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config provides continuous evidence generation, simplifies audit readiness, and enables real-time visibility into backup activities and compliance drift.
The Results
The groundwork delivered so far has already strengthened Ontime’s governance and operational readiness around data protection. Ontime’s Infrastructure as Code has been updated with consistent backup tagging across workloads.
This approach mitigates the risk of incorrectly assigned backup policies, reduces reliance on ad hoc configuration, and helps ensure that data is treated consistently across Ontime’s entire estate.
In parallel, Ontime is tailoring AWS Backup policies to align with their internal standards for data storage, resilience, and records retention. This alignment work is designed to ensure that backup behaviour is fully consistent with their regulatory, security, and operational requirements from day one.
As the rollout progresses, Ontime expects this foundation to translate into reduced manual effort, greater consistency of protection across environments, and a clearer, more auditable posture for backup and restore.
Customer Testimonial
« At Ontime, we place a high strategic value on having a robust, well-governed backup and recovery capability, » explained Simon Cockle, co-founder and CTO at Ontime. « The AWS Backup solution designed and implemented with Automat-it gives us centralized control across our Landing Zone, consistent policies that automatically extend to new accounts and resources, and coverage of key services.
« The combination of scheduled and continuous backups, cross-account and cross-region copies, and KMS-encrypted, immutable records provides a strong foundation for data resilience, disaster recovery, and audit readiness.
« The team at Automat-it were highly professional and skilled throughout the engagement. They understood our requirements, and delivered a smooth, well-structured implementation. This gives us confidence that our backup strategy is aligned with best practice and capable of supporting Ontime’s security, compliance, and operational objectives. »
Get in Touch
Ready to boost readiness, control, and confidence in your startup’s security and compliance ambitions? Talk to the Automat-it team today and start transforming your infrastructure.