Success Story: Interdiscount & microspot.ch
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7. October 2022
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19. October 2022
Success Story: Interdiscount & microspot.ch
Interdiscount and microspot.ch safeguard customer satisfaction with Wabion and Google Cloud
Takeaways:
- To defend and expand its leading market position, Interdiscount and microspot.ch count on a multicloud setup.
- Wabion has designed and implemented the front end based on Google Cloud products Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancer, and Cloud Armor.
- The new solution closes security gaps, improves customer satisfaction and ultimately future-proofs the online business of Interdiscount and microspot.ch.
Interdiscount is Switzerland’s No. 1 for tv, audio, video, home appliances, smartphones and much more. microspot.ch is Switzerland’s online shopping mall offering popular products for living, sleeping, sports, garden, and many more areas.
Both brands are part of Wabion customer Coop contributing more than 1.1 billion Swiss francs to the group’s revenues and employing more than 1800 people in more than 175 shops. For Interdiscount with its Omnichannel strategy and microspot.ch with its click & collect approach, online sales is key to defend and strengthen the market position.
Black friday must not be a black day
Previously, a private cloud provider was in charge of the hosting for the front ends of both brands’ websites, which included managed services from another public cloud provider. On busy days such as black friday, the previous setup occasionally could not accommodate peak demand.
The lack of flexibility and scalability led to costly downtime and interfered with customer service. As a result, Interdiscount and microspot.ch decided to move to a new solution that meets their dynamic business needs:
- Growth is critical, meaning that the new setup has to strengthen the companies’ market leadership by providing a flexible, scalable and cost-efficient infrastructure for the pivotal online business.
- Customer satisfaction is king, i.e. there must be no downtime of the online shops.
- Security is key, as popularity also attracts risks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Following the Coop group’s multi-cloud strategy, Interdiscount and microspot.ch chose a diversified solution for the new setup of their web applications including the websites. After the successful collaboration during the Cloud Foundation, Google Cloud Premier Partner Wabion got in charge of migrating the front ends of interdiscount.ch and microspot.ch.
Wabion’s proven approach for lift & shift migrations served as a guideline for the front end migrations. Interdiscount and microspot.ch drew on Wabion’s expertise for the entire Google Cloud product offering to optimize the new multi-cloud setup of their web applications.
Google Cloud as multi-cloud enabler
When Wabion took on the project, Interdiscount and microspot.ch had already decided to move the backend of the web applications to SAP Commerce Cloud and part of the front end to SAP Kyma. As the setup lacked a solid solution for crucial frontend functions such as geo blocking, SSL termination, logging, ACL, caching, and redirecting, Wabion designed an architecture for this realm based the Google Cloud Platform (GCP):
The new front end solution for the Interdiscount and microspot.ch web applications designed by Wabion combines Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud Armor. Together, the GCP products keep the apps and hence the online shops safely running at all times.
Meeting the project’s tight deadline, Wabion’s architecture closed the gap by joining three GCP products to run critical front end tasks:
- Cloud CDN: This fast, reliable web and video content distribution solution integrates with HTTP(S) load balancing to deliver content to users. Cloud CDN provides global distribution with anycast IP and is optimized for last-mile performance.
- Cloud Load Balancing: Putting resources behind a single anycast IP and scaling resources up or down with intelligent autoscaling, Cloud Load Balancing distributes compute resources in single or multiple regions. Integrated with Cloud CDN for optimal application and content delivery, this GCP product features HTTP(S) load balancing, Cloud Logging, SSL offload and more.
- Cloud Armor: To protect GCP deployments from threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLi), Cloud Armor comes along with adaptive protection, IP-based and geo-based access control, pre-configured Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules and other features.
In addition to designing the architecture, Interdiscount and microspot.ch asked Wabion to stay on board to support the implementation of the new front end solution. Before, during and after the go-live in February 2022, Wabion’s GCP experts focussed on performance optimization for Cloud CDN, Terraform engineering, cache invalidation, and further activities to keep the online business of Interdiscount and microspot.ch up and running.
Ready, steady, grow
The successful blocking of DDoS attack shortly after go-live provided the new front end setup with the opportunity to prove its value in multiple ways:
- By completing the multi-cloud infrastructure, the front end part based on the GCP products Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, and Cloud Armor, closes security gaps.
- Google’s unique infrastructure guarantees global availability, stability and scalability, enabling Interdiscount and microspot.ch to optimize customer satisfaction.
- The continued, best practices-based collaboration with Wabion future-proofs the new solution and paves the way to defend and expand the leading market position.
Interdiscount and microspot.ch provide a great example of how multi-cloud can not only be a buzzword, but also enable tailor-made solutions for ambitious companies while preventing vendor lock-ins. Provided the right choice of technology – along with a trusted and experienced partner – multi-cloud really is an accelerator for innovations and growth. Read more about Google Cloud’s multicloud solutions and browse our Migrate and Transform sections to find out how Wabion helps you get there.