More Digital Asset Management Case Studies

The client is a large container shipping company and inter-modal logistics supplier with 4000 worldwide employees and offices in 130 countries.

In recent years, the client had come to rely upon both their web site and internet systems to inform their customers, manage their suppliers and train their employees. Hosting was set up in an ad-hoc fashion and different facilities comissioned whenever new on-line systems were launched. The client's corporate web site was hosted in a data centre owned by their IT infrastructure provider but other applications were held on virtual hosts with commodity providers. This lead to a number of problems:

• Although the corporate site was highly available, the client’s marketing agency could not gain direct access to it to update content and scripts.
• The service levels of the hosting providers who held some of their other applications were inconsistent – some would be generally good while others suffered lengthy outages.
• There was no DR (Disaster Recovery) plan or even data backup for some of the applications.
• Security was similarly mixed – the corporate site was protected by a firewall. Other applications were hosted on Windows servers without any protection at all.

The fragmented provision and lack of consistency, flexibility or security from their various hosting providers was self-evidently having a direct negative impact upon the business and needed to be addressed.

Daydream’s managed hosting team were called in by the client. To resolve their issues, we proposed, specified and delivered a solution with these characteristics:

• A single unified hosting platform to hold both their corporate site and the other web applications. The platform was composed of a dedicated firewall as well as hosts for web server and database.
• Secondary firewall, web and database hosts to be used for selective live failover in the event of failure of the primary hosts (in other words, if any part of the primary platform failed, there would always be a backup ready to take over instantaneously).
• The database hosts were RAID-5 enabled with multiple redundant hot-swappable disks.
• All physical hosts were brand new models supported by a premium hardware support and warranty agreement that integrated with the client's existing IT procurement policies.
• Automated replication of database, web data (pages, scripts etc.) firewall settings and other files. The secondary firewall and servers were a 100% mirror of the entire primary facility.
• Automated server monitoring that would detect a failure in core services, automatically failover and notify an engineer by e-mail and SMS of the fault.
• A dedicated remote monitoring facility that would keep everyone informed about the system status - including a dashboard showing the key performance indicators.
• A fault reporting system set aside solely for the use of this client.
• A remote power switch and KVM over IP to allow engineers to control servers remotely - even if they were not responding. These were held behind a separate firewall and access was via a password over a 128-bit SSL encrypted connection.
• A tape based backup facility capable of backing up all the primary hosts each day to fully uncompressed media. Tapes stored in a fire proof safe.
• Remote backup of all the client's databases, web scripts, components, server settings and other dependent files to two independent off-site locations.
• A redundant hosting facility on standby for DR (Disaster Recovery) at a totally separate data centre.
• 256-bit encrypted VPN that allowed the client's agencies and other approved staff to gain secure access to the hosting facility to carry out script updates, database deployment etc.
• Intrusion detection, security monitoring, as well as a pro-active application security policy to alert the client if their applications were opening up potential loopholes that could be exploited.
• Automated pro-active security patch deployment system to ensure patches were deployed swiftly. Also including failover to secondary host if installation requires a server reboot.
• An SLA with 100% uptime, infrastructure, and connectivity guarantee, strict response times and service credits if we failed to keep our promises.

As part of our service, we assigned a dedicated migration handler to the client and arranged for the applications and services from their previous supplier to be copied, re-deployed, tested and launch dates for the final switch to be arranged. This included full liaison with the client's application developers, marketing agency, DNS and domain services providers to ensure the switch was made safely and without disruption. Daydream carried out much of the migration work over holiday or weekend periods and unscheduled downtime was completely avoided.

The hosting facility has not suffered any outages since being deployed and the client is now able to securely release updates to their web site and other applications in minutes rather than weeks or days.

 

For further information on Daydream's managed hosting services, please e-mail: info@daydream.co.uk or telephone us on +44 (0)20 7096 1471.

 

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