Park Holidays UK, one of the largest holiday park operators in the South of England, has selected Datapipe, a leader in managed cloud services for the enterprise, to replace its end-of-life infrastructure with a new cloud-based system utilising Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Park Holidays UK is one of the largest operators of holiday parks in the South of England, with 28 parks stretching from Devon in the South West to Suffolk in the East. Park Holidays UK offers its customers affordable caravan holidays, and it relies on its website and web-booking infrastructure to take most of its bookings. The demand for holidays is seasonal, with the bulk of the bookings coming in the lead-up to the busy summer period.
The Park Holidays UK website was running on legacy web servers that were first installed 10 years ago. In that time, the number of bookings taken through its website has grown dramatically. The infrastructure was reaching its capacity limit, so in February 2017 it began investigating new options. Park Holidays UK needed an entirely new technology stack built on AWS. It wanted to use the opportunity to rewrite its website from scratch and deliver a new, responsive site. However, Park Holidays UK did not have the expertise or knowledge to make such major changes to its infrastructure on its own, especially with regard to ensuring the new cloud-based solution was fully PCI complaint and that security was locked down. It needed guidance from a trusted partner.
With Datapipe it found that partner. Not only did Datapipe deliver a solution hosted on AWS, it offered Park Holidays UK a fully resilient solution with the ability to automatically bring on new resources when the load reaches a threshold, ensuring there is always spare capacity available. In case of any problems, failover time is now measured in minutes whereas previously, there was potential for up to two weeks of downtime for hardware replacements - this was a huge business risk to carry.
Datapipe also gave Park Holidays the reassurance that data held on the cloud would be secure. Datapipe's experts ensure that best practise methods are used to hold the data, and that end-to-end monitoring is in place to lock down the cloud environment.
Mike Procyshyn, IT Director at Park Holidays UK says: "Ten years ago, the majority of our bookings were taken via our call centre. Now the tables have turned, and most of our bookings come in via our website which makes it critical to our business. However, the infrastructure had not been significantly upgraded in that time and it was reaching the limits of its capacity.
"With the weak pound, more Brits than ever opted for a staycation this year, meaning we have been busier than ever. We could not afford to have any doubts about the resilience of our website and Datapipe has delivered a secure solution that sets us up for another ten years or more."
Scotty Morgan, Chief Sales Officer, Europe at Datapipe, says: "With Park Holidays UK, we delivered a new cloud-based solution that elastically scales depending on demand. It no longer has to worry about capacity issues and has a secure solution ready for the summer peak."
