JVR takes psychometrics to the next level with Azure

Psychometrics. Not a term the average person would throw into casual conversation, but likely something they have already seen or used. Anyone who has ever done an IQ test, a personality assessment (such as the popular Myers-Briggs personality type indicator), or even one of various career aptitude tests, has taken a psychometric assessment.

JVR Psychometrics stands out as a leading provider of international and local psychometric assessments in South Africa, having started 30 years ago with pen-and-paper assessments, before moving on to digital and online assessments on their own bespoke platform, JVR Online.

JVR’s clients include large and blue-chip companies, which use psychometric tests to make decisions when hiring top-level employees. Albie Janse van Rensburg, Senior Software Developer at JVR Solutions, says: “Our assessments are commonly used to screen candidates for positions that are a high risk for a company. It makes sense for companies to spend on their hiring process to ensure they make the right placement, because the wrong one could have severe financial repercussions. JVR’s assessments have a strong scientific backing and can be relied on during hiring decisions.”

Over and above screening potential new hires, JVR’s psychometric testing methodologies are of use to professionals such as therapists or researchers in the psychology space who are doing trials on a large scale and require thousands of people to complete a questionnaire. In addition, JVR partners with other psychometric testing businesses to administer tests.

JVR also carries out assessments in school environments, an area that has its own challenges in that one is dealing with minors, so there are special considerations around how that data is managed. Says Janse van Rensburg: “Our captured information is considered medical data, so we have to treat it with sensitivity and care.

“We’re confident that our customers and the public will see benefit in our recent infrastructure improvements. JVR has levelled up with Azure.”

Until last year, the JVR assessment platform had been hosted on-premises at an internet service provider’s data centre, and there were some problems. Says Janse van Rensburg: “On that server, we had a network of different virtual machines. It was a complex set-up that had served the company well for many years, but it had some flaws and it was starting to show in the system’s performance.”

Matters came to a head when the system went offline for several days and the supplier couldn’t be contacted. “There’s that shocking moment when you realise that you have put your eggs in a basket, and that basket has just vanished. We needed a quick solution, because all our assessments were being served from this system.”

At the time, JVR had already worked with ISSC on a project to move some data onto Azure. ISSC specialises in Azure infrastructure management. The two businesses combined forces to prepare an emergency “lift and shift” move using backup tapes. “Initially, we were going to replicate exactly what we had before onto Azure, warts and all. I was not comfortable with this strategy and ISSC agreed,” said Janse van Rensburg. “Luckily, after two days, the on-premises system came back online. This gave us some breathing room.”

The company needed to solve a couple of pain points. “There were regular errors and timeouts; we were very concerned about some automated brute-force login attempts to our infrastructure; and occasionally the hosting machine (hypervisor) would run into trouble with memory and/or disk space. We had some other intermittent problems with networking and performance.”

The internal development team at JVR Solutions had a basic working knowledge of Azure, so leaned heavily on ISSC’s expertise. Over the following few months, they completed a deep-level review of the existing set-up and identified and addressed the various pain points. They rebuilt the network on Azure with brand new virtual machines, porting over and rewriting some parts of the system in the process.

In terms of good governance, JVR followed a due diligence process, involving all stakeholders, with executive support, and prioritised stability and security over cost.

Cloud hosting offers instant recovery, geographically separated redundancy, monitoring tools, load balancing and other services that add up to a vastly superior end-user experience over traditional hosting. Microsoft Azure specifically boasts the benefit of hosting information locally instead of offshore, where different privacy laws apply.

Rigorous testing was conducted to prove that Azure delivered everything it promised for JVR, says Janse van Rensburg. “ISSC was instrumental in setting us up. The tiered network prevents internet connections to back-office servers and services. We saw a drastic reduction in bot-based login attempts. There is also monitoring and failover security in place, with near instant response times.”

In fact, the implementation was such a success that the monthly user-level failure rate, which had been climbing to record levels of over 800 calls in July 2022, dropped to about 30 after the move.

Next up, says Janse Van Rensburg, is modernising systems off the bedrock that is Azure. “We are working on the next iteration of the JVR Online system that we call OneJVR, replacing it one functional area at a time. For this, we are using automated builds and continuous integration with Azure DevOps to make our development pipeline more robust.”

During the system migration, JVR adopted a variety of other Azure features such as Azure AD, VPN, Defender for Cloud, Key Vault and DevOps.

More Azure Cloud features will be added, such as API Gateway, Service Bus and App Services, to offer next-generation architecture potential, flexibility and performance improvements, and further improved security using Web Application Firewall with active network inspection.

“We have an exceptional team, both internal and external. The biggest lesson that we've learned is that you can't beat good infrastructure. It really sets you up for future success. You must put down strong foundations when targeting exponential growth,” concludes Janse van Rensburg. “I guess we’re a real Microsoft shop now.”