From Floppy Disks to the Cloud

SSCS’s dedication to securing our customer’s data has been a constant since Day One of our existence.

Successful c-store owners recognize that adaptability is a key to consistent growth. As SSCS has grown along with our customer base, we’ve adapted along with them, ensuring our technology stays abreast of their operational needs.

That includes dedicating ourselves to rigorous care and safekeeping of our customers’ data even as the methodologies for doing have evolved over the 40 years that we’ve been in business.

When our company was born in 1981, consumer grade personal computers were just coming into use. Units like the TRS-80 (1977), the Texas Instruments TI 99/4 (1980), and the Commodore 64 (1982) were being marketed for private consumers, while the commercial market was trying to come to grips with what personal technology— considered the territory of eccentrics and hobbyists just a few years previous, and not cheap by any means—could do for their businesses.

It was into this bustling, rapidly changing landscape that SSCS released its first product—the SSM (Service Station Manager) program running on the Altos ACS 8000-2. With 16 KB of RAM, a 10 MB hard drive and a 1-mb 8” floppy drive, the unit was robust and flexible enough to handle the needs of a gas station/c-store and marked a significant technological advance.

In those early days, the onus was on the customer to back up and store their own data. Our software provided an easy, convenient means to make data backups onto those 8” floppies, so that if there was data loss the information could be easily restored from a disk.

Still, if as a company you’re going to dedicate yourself to protecting precious data, depending on the customer to do backups is probably less than ideal even with the best technology and a solid backup plan in place. So when we introduced our cloud software hosting platform, Sunray, way back in 2000, it eliminated the customer maintenance variable. It also demonstrated our commitment to locking down customer data and securing it on behalf of our customers, thanks to the factors listed here.

Sunray has proven to be a robust adaptable solution, and though we have consistently upgraded the platform—adding processing power and advancing security protocols along the way—the basic platform remains the same, proving its durability as an absolute advantage to our customers. It’s as steady a technology, as we are a company.

If you’d like to know more about the Sunray cloud hosting program, or any other aspect of SSCS technology that can give you a competitive advantage, please call (800) 972-7727 an ask for the Sales Department.