TIBUS

Background

Cork City Council is a local authority that provides a range of services to the city’s 123,000 residents. These include housing, roads, transport, planning, environmental and leisure services.

In the course of providing those services efficiently and effectively, the council has built a portfolio of 20 websites that are used by those living in, working in or visiting Cork. Members of the public rely on the websites for key information, services, and transactions, so it is important that they remain available to access even during particularly busy periods.

Tibus was tasked with providing a fully managed secure hosting service, including technical support, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.98% for the main corkcity.ie website and the council’s other websites.

What We Did

Tibus designed and built a completely private and fully managed cloud infrastructure, including an individual dedicated virtual server for each of the 20 websites, that can scale up or down depending on Cork City Council’s requirements. 

All of the servers are hosted in one of our purpose-built, secure data centre facilities in accordance with ISO 27001 standards.

We handled the migration to the new infrastructure and are taking care of hardware and software management, data backups and restorations, and security for the council on an ongoing basis.

We also provide a 24/7 monitoring and alerting service so that potential issues are identified and managed promptly.

A nightly backup is created locally at the data centre, while a secondary backup is created at an off-site location in another data centre so the council staff has complete peace of mind.

Result

The hosting architecture we have put in place delivers server optimisation, scalability, flexibility, speed of deployment, security, and high availability for Cork City Council. The 99.999% availability provided exceeds the council’s specification.

The council can depend on the servers to handle high volume traffic at peak periods, which means that residents can access the information and services they need even in busy or emergency situations.

Regular off-site backups provide the council with a clear and speedy disaster recovery strategy and help to mitigate the potential cost of cyberattacks.

Background

Northern Ireland Electricity Networks (NIE Networks) transports electricity to more than 860,000 customers in Northern Ireland through its transmission and distribution network. Many of those hundreds of thousands of customers will want to access the site simultaneously, particularly in the event of a power cut. 

Given the public service nature of the work, NIE Networks has an obligation to keep its website available during these peak periods in order to communicate with customers who might want to report or find out about a problem, keep up-to-date with information on when their power will be back on or follow official advice. While these flash crowds can be unexpected, it is possible to predict that they will normally happen during periods of extreme weather.

Being a large power infrastructure provider, NIE Networks is also a high-risk target for hackers and cybercriminals, so its website needs to have robust security to guard against those threats.

NIE Networks entrusted Tibus to scope, design, deliver and manage a hosting infrastructure capable of meeting those demands.

What We Did

How the NIE Networks website looks and performs for its customers is the key factor. NIE Networks understood this and we were clear on our duty of designing a hosting infrastructure to meet that goal.

We opted to deliver NIE Networks' web hosting via a private cloud, which provides all the benefits of cloud technology, including flexibility and scalability, but with a level of security that can only be achieved with true physical isolation.

The hosting set-up includes:

• VMWare’s best-in-class private cloud technology.
• Web server technology geared to provide high performance on busy websites.
• Caching tools to ease the strain on the server’s resources, improve page load and user experience.
• Optimisation conducted in collaboration with client’s web development team to ensure the hosting infrastructure and codebase complement each other to maximise site performance.
• Content delivery network (CDN) integration to relieve strain on the server’s resources and improve user experience.
• Full disaster recovery provision, so the site can be promptly restored in the event something does go wrong.
• This set-up is supported by policies - agreed and documented in collaboration between NIE Networks and Tibus - designed to ensure the website remains effective in fulfilling NIE Networks' requirements. Those policies include regular disaster recovery testing and simulations of website traffic conditions during severe weather.

Result

NIE Networks has in place a digital infrastructure to cope with the sort of strain that could be caused by a large-scale power cut. 

Their forward-thinking communications and digital team took the precautions of putting in place a reliable, secure and scalable hosting environment. The hosting set-up is designed to cope with worst case scenarios that might attract a large spike in traffic rather than just an average day. A comprehensive testing programme means the entire set-up is regularly put through its paces to ensure it continues to perform to the highest levels.

NIE Networks is an exemplar for the province. As a mature brand in a prominent public position, it has to give consumers confidence. It required an innovative and robust hosting solution to meet its unique demands, and we were delighted to put exactly that in place.  

Facing fierce competition from online bookstores e.g. Amazon, Eason developed a bold and innovative “bricks and clicks” retail model. The business put very substantial investment into its e-commerce capability, targeting both the Irish and International online markets.

Eason recognise that an always available and efficient e-commerce site is essential for survival, as downtime literally means lost sales and a slow user experience will push potential customers to competitors’ sites.

What we did

• Designed and delivered a dedicated managed hosting platform, using Private Cloud technologies
• Utilising virtualisation we deployed individual hosting environments for Eason’s applications and e-commerce site
• This platform is designed to be highly available and secure
• Extensive work with Eason development teams to maximise the performance of a demanding database-driven website
• Underpinning physical platform hosted in ISO 27001 accredited Tier 3 datacentres
• No single points of failure
• Fully managed service with comprehensive SLA

Result

• Ireland's best online book and eBook shop
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Better conversion rates
• Increased revenue
• Retail Excellence Ireland award for National Website of the Year, 2013

talkSPORT is the UK’s leading sports radio brand and the world’s biggest sports radio station. The broadcaster holds the rights for exclusive football commentaries from the Barclays Premier League, to which it is the global audio partner, as well as other competitions. In addition to its radio services on MW and DAB, talkSPORT makes its commentaries and other broadcasts available to listeners around the world on mobile, tablet, and desktop via its talkSPORT Live function.

It also runs the award-winning talkSPORT.com, which attracts huge numbers of visitors to read its daily selection of sports news, opinion, and analysis.

Tibus was tasked with providing hosting infrastructure for talkSPORT Live and talkSPORT.com.

The key aspect for both the streaming and web hosting services we built for talkSPORT was to ensure that the valuable content was delivered to listeners and readers around the world quickly, efficiently and with the highest levels of user experience.

To set about doing that we:

• Built a load-balanced solution for talkSPORT.com, so that the demand for resources is spread across several servers when the website gets a large influx of traffic.
• Created a selector that is clearly visible to fans and tailors the game choice to their location and language.
• Designed a highly innovative streaming platform to cope with the high levels of global demand for talkSPORT’s broadcasts.
• Integrated the site with OPTA, which provides the audience with live match stats in real-time.
• Built a partner platform, allowing talkSPORT to monetise their rights packages to the maximum extent.
• Enabled registration and login with social media using the Gigya platform for a more streamlined user experience.
• Integrated online services with talkSPORT's existing core broadcasting platforms.

The hosting and streaming platforms we’ve put in place ensure the very best user experience for all visitors to talkSPORT.com and listeners to talkSPORT Live. Even at peak times, such as when a big football story breaks, on transfer deadline day, or during important matches, the hosting resources are managed and optimised to cope with the demand.

The platform also offers secure rights management to help protect talkSPORT’s assets. This results in a website and broadcasts that deliver the desired results for users, advertising agencies, and advertisers themselves.

Overall, Tibus has taken the responsibility for technology management away from talkSPORT, allowing greater focus on their core business of broadcasting and monetising those broadcasts. We’ve helped talkSPORT to significantly grow its audiences both at home and abroad.

The 2011 MTV Europe Music Awards (EMAs) were held in Belfast, on Sunday, November 6, 2011, at the Odyssey Arena in the Titanic Quarter, additional live venues for the awards show included Ulster Hall and Belfast City Hall. It is estimated that the Awards generated £25m for the local economy and that it received coverage from over 130 media organisations from around the world, 8,000 room nights were booked by MTV across 40 hotels for guests, crew, and artists. 2,399 media articles were released in relation to the awards, 33,500 attended Belfast Music Week, and there were more than 170 gigs across 45 venues over the course of the week. Worldwide it is estimated 1.2 billion people watched the awards. This really was an immense gig!

With so much publicity it was imperative that Belfast was portrayed in its best light including high capacity and resilient connectivity for streaming of the show and Internet access for the whole entourage, from artists, producers, to the media to get their stories out worldwide.

Tibus provided a managed service to provide all Internet traffic and allow MTV, performers, and media to stream content live across the world, specialist links were configured for the VIP reception tent. Tibus worked very closely with the MTV Networks and Digital Media teams for over 6 weeks prior to the show for pre-event preparation. The test plans were agreed with the MTV Networks team weeks in advance, such as the planning these were relatively straightforward to work through when their teams arrived on the Wednesday before show night. Barring a small last-minute configuration change, this all went smoothly and we were ready! Our preparation work was effectively complete late on Thursday 3rd November.

On Sunday 6th our biggest challenge was ensuring that our in-arena technical team could traverse the security cordons without issue. As one might imagine, security was watertight – event security, police security, and then the various VIP security too. When we got our engineer into the arena it was a question of last-minute testing for dress rehearsals and sound-checks...and then waiting.

Everything went extremely well – we monitored the Internet streams minute by minute and regularly confirmed with the MTV technical team. The preparation paid off and we got a great thumbs-up from their guys after the show. There really is no substitute for being on-site and being available. Our guys had a different ‘show experience’ than the audience; staring at laptop screens and looking at technical stats was ever-so-slightly less glamorous than enjoying the buzz and VIP hospitality backstage. But we wouldn’t have had it any other way and we're proud to be an integral part of what was an extremely successful MTV EMA show.

Trócaire is the Catholic agency for overseas development. It is the official overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

 Tibus was tasked with providing a fully managed secure hosting service, including technical support, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99% for the new Trócaire website (www.trocaire.org)

 What We Did:

Tibus designed and built a completely private and fully managed cloud infrastructure, All of the servers are hosted in one of our purpose-built, secure data centre facilities in accordance with ISO 27001 standards.

 We managed the migration to the new infrastructure and are taking care of hardware and software management, data backups and restorations, and security for an ongoing basis.

 We also provide a 24/7 monitoring and alerting service so that potential issues are identified and managed promptly.

 A nightly backup is created locally at the data centre, while a secondary backup is created at an off-site location in another data centre so the  staff have complete peace of mind.

 Result:

The hosting architecture we have put in place delivers server, optimization, scalability, flexibility, speed of deployment, security, and 99.999% availability for Trócaire.

 Trócaire can depend on the servers to handle high volume traffic at peak periods, which means that site users can access the information and services they need even in busy or emergency situations.

 Regular off-site backups provide Trócaire with a clear and speedy disaster recovery strategy and help to mitigate the potential cost of cyberattacks.