Banyan Tree

Shaping a global luxury hospitality group's cloud environment for stability and scalability

The client

Banyan Tree is a world-leading, multi-branded hospitality group, operating and developing premium resorts, hotels, spas and residences since 1994. Banyan Tree offers customers exceptional travel experiences which it delivers through its 48 hotels and resorts, 64 spas, 74 retail galleries and 3 championship golf courses across 28 countries.

The customer challenge

Banyan Tree’s corporate website, hosted on Amazon Web Services, is critical to their revenue and reputation. They were facing a number of significant challenges that were preventing their website from reaching full, lead-generating potential. The two key issues being faced were:

  • The current platform didn’t meet their requirements as it performance was variable and availability was an issue
  • Furthermore the platform didn’t allow Banyan Tree to be agile and responsive preventing them from being responsive to customer demands
  • The existing Sitecore environment was facing a lot of instability which was causing downtime
  • Their AWS hosting bill was twice what they had budgeted, resulting in a large overspend

The solution and architecture

  • Through monitoring actual usage, Just After Midnight were able to provide them with cost-effective environments on AWS
  • JAM addressed issues with Sitecore application and the platform development and deployment process.
  • We worked with their application development team to bring stability to their Sitecore
  • JAM moved Solr instance on to own EC2 and added further instances for high availability
  • Additionally we addressed permissions issues enabling a local media cache for improved performance
  • Load time were reduced by resizing css and js files
  • The introduction of automated tools for building, deploying and testing the application removed human error relating to deployments and standard site checks are reduced substantially

Lessons learned and results

  • JAM holistic approach and skills across the AWS platform and Sitecore application showed that a wide ranging but incremental approach can results in huge gains;
    • Reduced spend by 50% and the savings is inclusive of JAM’s management fee
    • 100% application uptime since starting our signature 24/7 support
50%
cost savings
100%
application uptime

Quick and fast support and consulting on the overall web, DevOps and hosting needs. Very helpful as always.

Vinod Sukhija, Banyan Tree
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