Survitec
Stewardship of a business-critical safety system.
Industry: Maritime safety equipment & service
Engagement: Inherited platform maintenance & development
Stack: Legacy PHP (CodeIgniter)
Website: survitecgroup.com
A safety-critical system whose original team had shut down.
Survitec is a global leader in survival technology, serving the maritime, defence, aviation and energy sectors. Behind the scenes, one of Survitec's internal systems handles inspections and certificates for life rafts, plus the training documentation, customer records, vessel details, service-station information and allocations that the operation depends on.
The system had been built on a legacy PHP stack (CodeIgniter) and the company that built it subsequently shut down. Survitec was left in a position no one wants to be in:
- A business-critical platform with no support behind it - inspections, certificates and service-station allocations all run through the system, but the original team no longer existed
- Legacy framework, real-world consequences - CodeIgniter is well past its prime, but the system in front of it underpins regulated safety work that can't simply be switched off and rebuilt
- Institutional knowledge at risk - years of domain context (how certificates are issued, how service stations are allocated, how the data flows) lived in the code and a small group of people, with no continuity plan
- Compliance and audit pressure - in safety-critical operations, "the system was down" or "we lost the data" aren't acceptable outcomes
They needed a partner willing to step in, take ownership of the codebase, learn the domain, and keep the system running - reliably and accountably - while it continues to do its job.
Take ownership. Stabilise. Keep improving.
Two Clouds took over the platform - codebase, support, the domain knowledge behind it. Inheriting a legacy system isn't glamorous, but it's exactly the kind of work that protects a business when the original supplier disappears.
Inspections & Certificates
The core workflow - life-raft inspections and the issuance of certificates - kept running uninterrupted through the transfer, with continued development to refine the process as Survitec's operations evolve.
Service Stations & Allocations
The system manages service-station information and allocations across the network, so the right work goes to the right station - critical for global maintenance coverage on regulated safety equipment.
Customer, Vessel & Training Records
Customer records, vessel details and training documentation all live in one platform - giving the operations team a single source of truth across the inspection-and-certification lifecycle.
Stewardship of a Legacy Stack
CodeIgniter is past its prime, but pragmatic stewardship - security patching, careful change management, targeted modernisation - is more responsible than rushing a high-risk rewrite of a safety-critical system.
The lights stayed on. The work kept moving.
- Continuity through a supplier collapse - the system kept running when the original developers' company shut down, with no interruption to inspection-and-certification operations
- Domain knowledge captured - the workflows around certificates, service stations and allocations are now understood, documented and supported by an active team
- Safe, accountable change management - improvements continue to ship, but in the careful way a safety-critical system requires - not the move-fast way that breaks things
- A pragmatic modernisation path - the legacy stack is treated with respect: maintained, patched and steadily improved, with a long-term view rather than a risky big-bang rewrite
“The most valuable thing you can do for a business with a critical inherited system isn't to rebuild it - it's to keep it running, learn what it actually does, and improve it carefully. Rewrites are the easy story to tell; stewardship is the harder one.”
How we approached the engagement
