Designing and building a hosting solution for an advanced e-commerce

Gigatron, a leading Serbian retailer and operator of an advanced e-commerce platform, focuses on providing the highest level of services to its customers. However, as Gigatron’s operations and data volumes grew, the company was unable to meet these demands with its existing IT infrastructure. Because the infrastructure lacked scalability, the retailer was unable to quickly add new resources during occasional traffic peaks. The company understood that to achieve a smooth performance of its IT systems, they had a need for a new, more flexible solution.

Project Goals

• Increase the stability, availability, and security of IT systems. 
• A solution can meet unexpected traffic peaks  
• Improve the protection and security of client data. 
• Local expertise and support.  

Approach

• Current and future needs were analyzed to create a system topology that would meet Gigatron’s existing, as well as future requirements  
• Transitioning to the Mainstream cloud setup with managed support 
• Complete support for system maintenance, monitoring and problem solving  

Results

• Increased web application stability due to more reliable IT infrastructure 
• Data security in an isolated cloud environment 
• 24/7 monitoring, support and maintenace of the client’s infrastructure  

Beginning of collaboration

With growing business demands, Gigatron needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure. Their existing solution lacked the ability to scale resources quickly – even having dedicated resources was not enough to achieve the desired level of stability.

Because they rely heavily on IT to support their main business, Gigatron realised there was an urgent need for a solution that would meet these requirements and decided to engage Mainstream for the project.

Client requirements

Gigatron began trading more than 20 years ago as a “brick and mortar retailer” with two employees has since then grown into one of the leading e-commerce businesses in Serbia, offering IT devices, consumer electronics and white goods. The new solution to support its growth had to meet the following requirements:

• better connection between backend and frontend systems for inventory tracking  
• Secure and reliable IT infrastructure that supports continuous innovation

The main goal was to simplify daily tasks for more than 400 employes (at the time) and maintain the highest quality of service offered through the e-commerce platform.  

Our solution

Analysis and Recommendation

Together with the Gigatron team, based on our extensive experience and expertise in designing tailored IT environments, we analyzed their needs and recommended the best solution.  

Transition to Mainstream Managed Hosting

Mainstream managed hosting services was selected as it provides guaranteed resources that ensure reliability and stability. Since this is a cloud-based service, it is also highly scalable – resources can be added quicky to meet changing demand. The new solution was tested on Black Friday, when Gigatron experienced significantly more visits to its online store than usual, and it passed the test with flying colours.  

Data security

The solution we implemented ensure that all data can be accesses quickly and easily, even in the case of unexpected events. The system was designed in a way the eliminates Single Point of Failure and thus ensures high availability.  

End-to-end Support

Mainstream is responsible for managing and optimising infrastructure, ensuring that it is always available, which in turn allows Gigatron to focus on strategic business initiatives. This type of support includes continuous monitoring and problem solving that guarantees optimal web system performance, as well as security.