World Options
Moving to an AWS solution gave World Options the reliability, resilience, security and performance it craved.
World Options
Helping to overcome time-consuming and costly manual processes, World Options meets the global shipping and courier needs of businesses through a simple yet powerful online system. Founded in 2003, the business provides services to organisations throughout the UK and beyond.
The challenge
After a period of review, it became clear to World Options that its existing database system did not provide the levels of resilience, availability and security that the business required.
The incumbent single server solution had particular impact on the largest part of the business - its UK operation. With consistent heavy demand on infrastructure, any outages would result in significant business disruption.
But availability was not the only issue. The existing infrastructure hosted both the customer portal and its supporting database, exposing sensitive customer data to increased risk from being directly accessible over the internet.
Any replacement system would need to facilitate continued growth of World Options' UK operation while reducing the significant risk of failure and overcoming any latent security vulnerabilities.
The solution
Zen proposed migration of World Options’ UK services into an AWS environment to help overcome the identified shortcomings.
The existing database would be scaled up to cater for peak load in the UK, plus a comfortable overhead, while network security would be improved through the implementation of database and application security groups among others.
By moving the database to AWS, it would now reside within a private network, no longer directly accessible from the internet, and data in transit would be protected by TLS (Transport Layer Security) with data at rest securely encrypted.
The whole solution would be monitored and configured to strict standards. And the introduction of a new elastic solution would ensure easy deployment along with improved scalability and availability.
The benefits
World Options now enjoys improved availability, performance and security.
The business is now in a healthy position to scale efficiently, while maintaining its high standards and ensuring data security.
Reliability is enhanced through the AWS solution, while consistent and secure deployment reduces the risk of negative performance.
World Options is now able to continue its expansion, without fear of outgrowing capacity, system downtime or undermining security.
