The company
Mwave.com.au is a leading Australian online tech retailer, well-renowned amongst PC enthusiasts and the gaming community. Founded in 2006, Mwave pride themselves on their strong reputation for delivering a great shopping experience with professional customer service and technical expertise to both consumers and organisations alike.
We spoke to Otto Xu, Chief Technology Officer at Mwave to discuss their recent IT transformation and how they have positioned themselves to continue to be a leading Australian e-commerce business.
The challenge
As CTO, Otto oversees the organisation’s IT strategy and technology implementation to support the wider business goals. To continue providing a leading customer experience, Otto identified room for improvement in multiple areas which could be solved by leveraging the expertise of a managed services provider.
Looking towards a future state for mwave.com.au, Mwave identified the need for serverless technologies, greater scaling power, the introduction of automation, CI/CD, agile methodologies, and a faster way to market for feature and product releases.
With a 24/7 e-commerce website comes the need for 24/7 monitoring as a small organisation, with roughly 70 employees and unable to scale their IT team further, Mwave faced a gap in expertise and resource availability to provide 24/7 monitoring.
With changing business requirements, Mwave’s development team found themselves needing to adjust their ways of working to ensure a consistent user experience in both dev and live environments and find efficiencies in their deployment processes.
And lastly, to ensure a secure shopping experience for consumers and businesses and a secure environment, Mwave identified the need to continually improve their security posture against the constantly changing security landscape.
The solution
Mwave partnered with AC3 to assist them in multiple areas across their IT function.
To transition to a serverless environment, AC3 and Mwave implemented an AWS Landing Zone, using an AWS Control Tower to leverage best practices focusing on security, reliability, performance, operations, and cost optimisation.
To provide a consistent, reliable customer experience, AC3 and Mwave worked together to research and demonstrate how Amazon OpenSearch Service can provide fast search functionality for the website, Selenium browser tests to ensure the end-user can use their choice of browser and have a consistent experience from search to checkout.
To assist the Mwave’s development team, Mwave leverage AC3’s DevOps as a Service and DevOps and Agile Enablement to help ensure all deployments are failure resistant and deployment processes are as automated and expedited as possible.
To uplift their security posture, AC3 performed a Security Assessment of Mwave’s AWS hosted infrastructure, providing an analysis of their security position with respect to Information Security.
The results
Once transitioned to a serverless environment, AC3 provide 24/7 managed AWS hosting services, delivering proactive monitoring and support to ensure uptime and resilience.
Through AWS Control Tower, AC3 and Mwave can provision new AWS accounts in a few clicks, ensuring conformity to company-wide policies.
By utilising serverless technologies, Mwave has a reduced load on their main servers, can provide faster load times for end-users and increased the uptime of mwave.com.au during peak spikes resulting in a 20% increase in sales in their recent Black Friday sales.
With increased agility and reduced release delivery times, Mwave can go to market faster and provide their technical teams with more control and flexibility to focus on the more important tasks, as well as perform fast, automated tests to ensure dev and live environments reflect each other.
“Partnering with AC3 allows us to leverage expertise for hosting, agile enablement, cyber security, network, systems admin and more so we can focus on achieving our business goals” says Otto.
“They have provided us with a security recommendation report that gives us direction in what we need to do to improve our security posture.”
“Partnering with AC3 allows us to have support in every area that we may not have the resources for, in a budget-friendly way” concluded Otto.
