[CASE STUDY] HOW EVENT NETWORK’S 100+ ONLINE STORES STAY UP AND SECURE THROUGH THE HOLIDAY SEASON AND BEYOND, WITH WEBSCALE

In 1998, Event Network launched a store for the Titanic Artifact Exhibition in Boston. Today, the company is a leading operator of experiential retail stores for more than 100 cultural attractions and lifestyle destinations, including New York’s Museum of Natural History, the Tech Museum, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Henry Ford Museum.

The Need for Scale and Security

To achieve and surpass their expected revenue growth rate, and with 50% of sales coming from the last quarter every year, Event Network needed to ensure their partners’ websites delivered a great digital experience and were available 24×7, especially during the holiday season. The company also needed to secure these online stores from cyber threats, including DDoS attacks and data theft (hackers stealing identities and credit card information).

The Digital Commerce team at Event Network was having a hard time achieving these objectives with their previous web hosting environment. When traffic peaked during the holidays, their servers buckled, causing painful downtime. The onslaught of DDoS attacks aggravated the problem.

“We were telling our partners to not do online marketing during the holidays, (something) that we, otherwise, would have obviously wanted them to do. It was an embarrassment,” said the Event Network team.

They started looking for a hosting partner that could ensure 100% uptime, while offering robust protection against cyber threats. The team’s number one goal was to deliver an outstanding online experience for their partners, at all times.

The World’s Most Scalable and Secure Hosting Infrastructure

Webscale worked with Event Network to eliminate the issues they were facing with their previous hosting environment. With Webscale, Event Network got unlimited, real-time, and predictive auto-scaling, capable of forecasting traffic surges and scaling ahead of demand automatically, to ensure 100% uptime, regardless of traffic volume.

“It allows us to extend the service that we provide to our partners and be there for them when their big promotions and marketing campaigns are active,” said the Event Network team.

Not only are the servers up and running 24x7x365, Webscale also ensures that Event Network’s infrastructure is right-sized at all times, by scaling in servers, when not required, leading to considerable cost savings.

In addition, Webscale provides a comprehensive security stack for Event Network, defending their online stores against DDoS attacks, malware insertions at the backend, credit card information theft, and other e-commerce-specific threats.

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

Whether it’s bad code or a cloud provider that causes an outage, it is critical to have a business continuity plan that helps online merchants bounce back from the outage faster than anyone else. Event Network deployed Webscale’s multi-cloud Disaster Recovery (DR), a solution that operates across different regions of multiple cloud providers to provide a disaster recovery mechanism that helps businesses remain high-performing in the event of operational downtime.

“This solution allows you to really migrate from one cloud to another one within 60 minutes, whereas in the past, you could have servers down for almost half the day until you figure it out,” the Event Network team commented.

“Implementing Webscale’s multi-cloud DR solution gives us the security and peace of mind that we, and our partners, need in order to drive as much marketing as possible, so we can hammer it and not worry about sites going down,” they added.

When asked about how Event Network felt going into the holiday season with Webscale, they shared, “We’re ready, we’re prepped, and we’re confident that it’s going to hold up.”

World-Class Customer Support and Expertise

Event Network also receives 24x7x365 proactive customer support from Webscale. Webscale’s support team provides the business freedom from infrastructure management hassles and rapid technical issue resolution. The brand has round-the-clock access to Webscale’s award-winning team of cloud and e-commerce experts, with more than 50 accreditations and certifications across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (CGP), and Microsoft Azure.

When asked to summarize the Webscale experience, the digital commerce team at Event Network said, “It’s something that we, as a team, are bragging about internally, as well as to our partners.”

Hear Event Network’s story, in their own words, in this video.

If you would like us to help you achieve similar results for your online storefront, drop us a note at sales@webscale.com.