eLINIA

Co-operative Financial Services is made up of The Co-operative Bank offering a wide range of banking products and services, The Cooperative insurance, investments and asset management. The Co-operative Bank also launched the first full internet bank in the UK – Smile. By offering great products accessible 24/7, smile has proved to be a breath of fresh air in the banking market.

 

Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) turned to managed hosting provider eLINIA to bolster its web presence and ensure the organisation’s website has the capacity to deal with the increasing popularity of its services.

 

The Need
CFS identified an issue with the scalability of its brochure and applications website as traffic to the website increased. With the existing infrastructure working to full capacity, customers’ ability to download service documents, set up current accounts and complete loan applications was hampered.

 

The company turned to eLINIA for a scalable platform to ensure that the company’s online offering was fully equipped to cope with the peaks and troughs of demand.

 

Mike McFarland CFS, said: “Our financial services are going from strength to strength, and the sheer volume of traffic meant our infrastructure was beginning to creak. It was a nice problem to have, but we realised it was something we needed to fix quickly in order to meet the demand from our services.”

 

The Solution
In the space of a month eLINIA submitted designed and delivered a fully-managed platform for the CFS website, to meet the company’s requirements.

 

As a precaution against potential downtime, eLINIA implemented resilient disaster recovery architecture spread across eLINIA’s tier 3 data centres in both London and Slough. The dual site technology enables CFS to have its primary active site operating from eLINIA’s green data centre in Slough while a passive standby site in London will automatically failover via eLINIA’s Global Site Selector should a disaster occur.

 

James Carnie, technical architect at eLINIA said:“Without the flexibility that managed service providers can offer, organisations can find themselves in trouble when the unexpected happens. Potential customers will quickly go elsewhere if they struggle to access your website, and a great opportunity can be lost almost as quickly as it arises.”