Avalara recently indicated that they are making some big changes to their Infrastructure Technology. These changes will impact users of Avalara AvaTax, Avalara Returns and Avalara Admin Console and went into full effect earlier this month. Specifically, Avalara is implementing Amazon Web Services to provide “additional hosting capabilities” over and above their own Avalara data center. Per Avalara, "this change is part of Avalara’s strategy to implement data center redundancy to ensure service reliability to our partners and customers."
What does this mean to your Sage ERP?
If your Sage 500, Sage 100 or Sage X3 software is configured to interact with the Avalara service, you likely want to know what this means to you and what impact it might have. The move to the Amazon Web Services will provide a more robust platform to host the Avalara services. If you have experienced issues with the Avalara service being unavailable or poor response times, this move should help to alleviate or greatly reduce the occurrences. This will in turn provide a better experience for your users that process transactions requiring tax calculation.
What Impact will I see?
Most users of these Avalara services will not experience any impacts from this change and it will be business as usual. However, to ensure that you will have no disruption in calculation of Tax, you should review the below information.
If your organization has whitelisted or hard coded the Avalara IP Address for Avalara AvaTax, Avalara Returns and/or Avalara Admin Console; you will be impacted. The single IP address used in the past would whitelist their own Avalara data center. At some point, your transactions will be transferred or moved over to the Amazon Web Service which does not use a single IP address. And although you may not immediately experience a problem transacting with Avalara, you will want to make changes to whitelist the Amazon Web Services.
The term “whitelist” is a security measure and means you have pre-approved a software application to be present and active on a computer system. The goal of whitelisting is to protect computers and networks from potentially harmful applications. By whitelisting a specific IP address, it gives permission for the application to transact between your network system and their datacenter.
What do I do?
In order to limit or eliminate the potential disruption of transactions not being accepted at your network following these instructions from Avalara:
- For most AvaTax customers, this change will have no visible impact. Using AWS will help Avalara to ensure your service is more reliable than ever.
- If your company uses IP address whitelisting configuration for your software that uses AvaTax, you will need to make changes ahead of this date to maintain your AvaTax configuration. You can learn more about those changes in our Help Center article.
- If you are unsure about whether this applies to your company, ask someone in your technology or IT team “Do we need to make any IP changes to our software that uses AvaTax because Avalara will change its IP address ranges?”
- If they say no: Great, you are done!
- If they say yes: Give them the information below
- If your company doesn’t have an IT team, you can ignore this message as you would not have configured your software to use certain IP address ranges.
What is being done (Give this part to your technical person)
- Adding AvaTax to AWS hosting in addition to our existing data center
- Introducing a new range of AWS IP addresses in addition to the existing Avalara IP addresses
- This change was implemented on Oct 9th.
Using the Help Center article you will find the information needed to subscribe to the AWS IP Address Range Notifications. Avalara will not manage your whitelist. Once you subscribe to the notification, your IT department will need to update the whitelist accordingly.
If you have additional questions, you can Contact Avalara Support at (877) 780-4848 or Support@Avalara.com.
RKL eSolutions can also be your resource for assistance. Whether you are a small 3 person office or a large 3,000 person corporation, we have the answers to your questions. RKL eSolutions can help your company understand infrastructure and design a network that is secure and reliable.
Have more questions?
https://www.rklesolutions.com/get-in-touch/
