Time to get technical
Malmaison is one of the UK’s most stylish and distinctive travel brands. Operating 17 boutique hotels from Aberdeen to Brighton, the chain is known for glamorous and distinctive design, as well as great bars and restaurants. We’ve worked with Malmaison for over eight years now, completely transforming the way the brand looks and feels.
This time, though, we got technical. We examined the way the chain’s hosting environment worked, and identified how we could make is safer, more flexible and more secure - without them having to pay more.
Can we help your brand too?
Our work for Malmaison has consistently married creative flair with hard-nosed, analytical savvy. If you’d like to see how we could do the same for your brand, get in touch.
A more cost-effective platform was needed
Malmaison’s hosting was due for decommissioning when we identified an opportunity to migrate to a more secure and cost-effective platform. With the chain’s website absolutely critical for business, our client needed a secure, stable, scaleable and compliant environment.
Taking Mal to the Cloud
Our strategy was to use regional pairs in the Cloud, benefitting from isolation and ensuring optimal availability for applications. The solution is configured on Azure fault-isolated physical locations, with independent power, network and cooling. Backups are stored in a secure vault with built-in management of recovery points, configured to be easily restorable as needed.
If that all sounds super technical, it’s because it is. The results, though, are very easy to understand. Basically, the whole environment is now extremely stable, with massively improved uptime. And if the worst were to happen, the regional pairing concept means we’d be able to recover in double-quick time.
Toward a tailored solution
We began the process by getting as much information as we could about what the business really needed. We then turned these requirements into a hosting specification detailing components, application flows, hosted topology, business continuity procedures and monitoring features.
Our approach ensured a smooth and transparent process, from migration through staging to regression testing.
A problem-free migration and game-changing outcomes
We achieved a problem-free migration from the old, decommissioned environment to our new Equator Cloud environment, on time and on budget. Our client benefits from significantly more secure and stable hosting, without paying a penny more in ongoing costs. The Service Level Agreements (SLAs) we're achieving are amongst the very best in the industry, and we're understandably proud of them. Highlights include:
>99.5%
Monthly uptime for virtual machines in an availability set
>99.9%
Monthly uptime for single instance virtual machines
>99.9%
Monthly uptime for SQL database
Not just a pretty face
Our technical work for Malmaison shows how we can achieve great things behind the scenes, as well as upfront. And by solving potential problems without increasing costs, we’re helping to future-proof how the brand and the business work. If you’d like to see what we could do for your own business, call us now.