Interflora is the UK's most recognised flower delivery brand and has a network of over 1,800 member florists, many of whom are small, often family-run companies. As well as being the largest flower delivery company in the UK, Interflora is also the longest serving flower delivery network in the world approaching 100 years of service.
The Need
With its core flower ordering platform at full capacity and some of the platform’s equipment and operating systems reaching the end of their operational life cycle, Interflora needed to establish a new capability providing a PCI and Sarbanes Oxley compliant Private Cloud solution that fitted the bespoke and demanding requirements of Interflora.
The Solution
Interflora responded to this need by investing in a Private Cloud solution from managed services specialists, eLINIA. The platform, now based on RedHat Linux and hosted at eLINIA’s Slough Data Centre, gives Interflora a robust and highly secure hosting platform that boosts performance and follows the company’s corporate roadmap of going Opensource.
As the infrastructure experiences extreme bursts of traffic around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and in the lead up to Christmas, it was critical that the company’s core ordering platform was highly scalable and flexible in order to accommodate peaks and troughs in web traffic. The eLINIA solution meets this requirement to such a degree that existing Interflora stress tests simply cannot break the platform and, when compared with the old system, the eLINIA solution is well recognised to be delivering a far more efficient service at the lowest operating costs.
Equally important to Interflora are data security and compliance. The requirement for the highest levels of security plus PCI and Sarbanes Oxley compliance is mandatory. eLINIA happily responded positively to both compliance requirements and exceeded Interflora’s security requirement by providing the highest level of security and infrastructure management commercially available in the UK market.
In summary, when compared with the previous system, eLINIA has provided a service that is not only faster and more flexible, but provides a solution that can be rapidly scaled up on-demand to support Interflora’s evolving operational requirements. eLINIA has surpassed Interflora’s expectations by providing a robust and highly scalable solution on time and on budget, whilst maintaining the highest standards in security.
Key Benefits
Interflora is now achieving significant returns from the eLINIA solution. A number of key benefits are now being enjoyed by the company as the new Private Cloud solution:
- Provides speed and flexibility
- Can be rapidly and easily scaled up and down on demand to match the operational traffic being experienced
- Provides the highest level of security and infrastructure management commercially available in the UK market
- Complies with both the PCI Security Compliance Standards and the US Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002
- Follows the company's corporate roadmap of going Opensource
- Provides a robust and highly scalable solution that was delivered on time and on budget whilst maintaining the highest standards in security