Flexible Hosting, Rapid Incremental Scale
Aspidistra are business-to-business e-commerce experts. Their award-winning solutions help businesses improve their efficiency and productivity online.
Based in Kingsbridge, South Devon, the multi-disciplinary team create bespoke e-commerce solutions with a combination of creative and technical expertise, which are utilised by industry leading manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.
Their unique B2B e-commerce platform, Shopfront, seamlessly integrates popular accounting systems to offer highly customised and feature rich customer experiences.
Aspidistra’s aim is to help their customers spend less time processing orders, and more time growing their business and customer bases. The specialist team has over 20 years’ experience in helping businesses create personalised e-commerce solutions to deliver on this objective.
In the case study below, Aspidistra’s Managing Director Paul Dorey, explains what they were looking for in a cloud partner, and why they chose Secura to deliver cloud hosting for the business.
Click the header above for the full text transcript of the Aspidistra case study video.
Paul:
Hello. My name is Paul Dorey, and I’m the Managing Director and Founder here at Aspidistra Software. At Aspidistra, our soul and principal product is a business to business e-commerce solution. Our target market at Aspidistra is manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers, 10 to 200 employees, 2 to 20 million turnover. We were looking to have something that could scale more incrementally.
On our previous private cloud, we bought a number of machines and sized it above our needs at the beginning of the contract, and then towards the end of the contract, we were faced with either moving or buying more machines. So the migration with Secura was extremely well planned – we had detailed meetings and discussions, and Secura were able to arrange a virtual private network connection to our existing hosting supplier, which meant that we were able to bring databases across. We were able to go to a hybrid mode of working, where we were actually, at one point, serving up from our old facility against data which had already been moved. So it gave us a very seamless way of transferring from one site to the other, and it was well executed, with tremendous support.
When we moved to Secura, we’d already spent quite a lot of time thinking where we wanted to be, from where we were. Our deployment and rollout procedures in the previous facility had been pretty manual, and we knew that had to improve in whichever facility we went to. Now, with Secura, we have duel data centre facilities, split by more than 50 geographical miles, and a disaster recovery plan to make our enterprise customers available within an hour, and our other customers available in two to three days, with a complete rebuild.
Working with Secura is a real pleasure. They’re extremely competent, timely, and take a genuine interest in us as a business. So, the day to day support we get from Secura is tremendous; if you need them on the end of the phone, they’ll be there on the end of the phone.
Virtual Private Cloud
Aspidistra enjoy the VPC’s inherent scalability, allowing resources be added granularly when they’re needed.
Proactive Support
Secura’s round-the-clock support team ensure any issues or queries that Aspidistra have are dealt with quickly and effectively.
Aspidistra were looking for a solution that could scale more incrementally. In their previous platform, they had bought hardware and sized it above their requirements to accommodate for increasing usage and business growth.
However, at the end of the contract, they were faced with either moving to a new platform or contracting for a new fixed period for another oversized platform. Refreshing private cloud hardware in this way involved large capex costs, and was something they wanted to avoid.
Aspidistra needed a cloud hosting platform that could support its B2B e-commerce solutions with robust infrastructure, operating system management and the ability to scale more granularly with their needs. Secura was able to provide them with a flexible, fully managed virtual private cloud environment with the scalability and OPEX cost model they had been looking for.
During migration, Secura setup a virtual private network connection to their previous platform, meaning Aspidistra were able to use a hybrid mode of working, migrating websites and databases easily at a pace that suited them and their customers, giving them a very seamless way of transferring to Secura’s services.
Aspidistra knew the kind of solution they required; their deployment and rollout procedures on the previous platform had been fairly manual, and this needed improving. After migrating to Secura’s virtual private cloud (VPC), the increased flexibility of their platform has helped them design new internal tools to improve the productivity of their rollout processes.
The virtual private cloud is built upon robust infrastructure foundations, with a highly available 10Gbps MPLS ring network between UK-based Tier 3+ data centres to ensure no single point of failure across the service. This was hugely important for Aspidistra, as downtime would be detrimental to their customers’ businesses, and the VPC’s 99.99% Service Level Agreement (SLA) offers them the peace of mind that their applications and websites are built on highly available infrastructure.
Downtime was not an option for Aspidistra, and their hosting platform is highly resilient and highly available.
The VPC’s granular scalability enables Aspidistra to scale their resources closely in-line with their business demands.
The Secura team seamlessly transferred Aspidistra’s applications and data to the virtual private cloud without any unnecessary interruptions.
