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Fully Managed Hosting:
The move for one online retailer to a trusted advisor

By: Inforonics, LLC

The company depicted in this case study is a leading multi­channel retailer of healthy home products and allergy relief products. The company continues to experience significant growth with increased sales in 2006 earning the company a place in the Internet Retailer 500 2007 ranking.
 
Growing Pains:
Before moving to Inforonics, a large online retailer was growing its online store’s supporting infrastructure organically, adding servers in response to business demand. Servers were dispersed among four different hosting providers. The intent was to maximize IP diversity and mitigate downtime caused by problems with a single vendor. This strategy, however, came with serious consequences.
 
Downtime events became more frequent while communication from hosting providers was waning. Hosting providers were neglecting to provide timeframes regarding recovery times and the e-tailer never received subsequent reporting of root causes and measures taken to prevent reoccurrences. As sales increased, the company discovered that many of the hosting providers lacked the expertise and infrastructure capable of handling the growth and traffic associated with an expanding on-line retail business. An inordinate amount of time was spent trying to manage vendors and recover from outages while important business functions such as enhancing the customer experience and developing new products were neglected.
 
With steady growth in traffic and sales, a stronger focus was placed on achieving HACKER SAFE® and PCI compliance in order to secure the shopping experience for the company’s customers. As the compliance project moved forward, the e-tailer uncovered a multitude of issues, not only with their own implementation, but also with the hosting infrastructure supporting its systems. Resolution of many HACKER SAFE and PCI compliance deficiencies were out of the company’s hands. It was clear that achieving these important goals would be time consuming and difficult, if not impossible, given their then current environment.
 
Managed Services:
In order to regain control of its servers and network, the e-tailer knew it required a fully managed hosting solution. It needed a trusted advisor with far reaching industry expertise to help inform its technology decisions; an accomplished partner with service level agreements regarding uptime, security and the expandability demands of a fast growing on-line retail organization. 
                                             Enter Inforonics 
Inforonics is a leading managed services provider with over 45 years experience in building secure, highly available technology environments for its clients. Throughout the evaluation process, the e-tailer was able to ‘check the block’ on all the hosting capabilities it was seeking. From Inforonics’ highly redundant, state of the art network infrastructure, to its partnership with ScanAlert to obtain HACKER SAFE certification, its PCI compliant environment to its ability to en­sure the availability, scalability, and IP diversity needs of the on-line retailer, they had everything the company needed, and more. Perhaps most importantly, In­foronics was able to act as a trusted advisor, bringing years of custom managed services expertise to bear on the issues confronting the e-tailer’s team in its quest to grow the business.
 
Making the Leap:
As with any on-line retailer, downtime for the company meant lost revenue. Cur­rent and future operational stability was paramount in the design considerations for the new environment. In addition, the actual process of migrating functions over to Inforonics was extremely important. This process carried with it a high risk for downtime, which could result in significant lost revenue; both during mi­gration, and potentially after the migration process was completed.
 
Inforonics engineers collected network traffic and server resource utilization data from the existing distributed systems as the first step in designing the new solu­tion. By gaining a thorough understanding of the as-built environment, it was possible to identify the needs and current weak points, and to design a solution that provided a high level of redundancy. Additionally, Inforonics was able to right size the hardware implementation to keep capital expense costs to a mini­mum. Redundancy and scalability would be maximized without spending money on unneeded or under utilized components. All major design decisions were dis­cussed in detail and feedback from all parties was considered as part of the de­velopment process.
 
Once the new design was architected, these same Inforonics engineers mini­mized risk by implementing the solution in a preproduction environment. The im­plementation was refreshed regularly with live data and engineers from both companies collaborated in performing functionality and fault recovery testing. The results of all testing was recorded and provided to the company as part of the implementation solution.

The migration of the e-tailer’s on-line store to the newly designed environment within the Inforonics infrastructure went without incident and was completed in less than the anticipated time. The on-line retailer succeeded because of its diligence in finding the right partner; a partner that had expertise, a proven best practices operational model, the infrastructure necessary to ensure success and a partner that had the willingness to collaborate, advise and share responsibility.

                                               
In the time since the company migrated to Inforonics, they have experienced double-digit growth, added two additional online retail sites to its enterprise inventory and continue to utilize the environment as originally designed and implemented.
 
The company continues to leverage Inforonics not only as their managed services provider but also as their advisor and partner on many other projects including site enhancements, in-depth analysis of “what if” scenarios involving new stores and offerings, the impact of exponential growth, database and application technology upgrades and business continuance and disaster recovery models. The recipe for the success of these projects is the same as it was for the initial design and migration; understand the issues, model the environment, plan the changes and collaborate throughout the lifecycle of the process.

About Inforonics:
Inforonics helps its clients succeed with solutions to their business and technology challenges.  Inforonics’ team of professionals deliver premium managed services and branded technical support to small to mid-sized businesses.  Clients benefit from the company’s unique ability to create, deploy and support highly customizable, scalable and flexible services to meet changing business needs.

Inforonics offers branded, multi-tiered technical support - up to 24/7; device management and monitoring solutions in its clients’ data centers or in their scalable, secure facility; custom application management and SaaS-enablement services. Based in Littleton, MA, Inforonics has been a privately-held company for over 40 years. For more information, visit www.inforonics.com.