Case Studies

How Global Surf Industrie’s transition to cloud infrastructure continues to serve their growing global demand

Kaylie Irving
April 7, 2020

Global Surf Industries (GSI), the world’s largest surfboard manufacturer, approached Experience Digital after problems were identified with their ageing traditionally hosted technology infrastructure. Having built their technology needs from the ground up, over time GSI reached a point where aspects needed immediate attention, including the immediate need for cloud migration to ‘future proof’ their business.

Founded in 2002 out of Manly in NSW, Australia, with the clear vision of expanding globally, GSI quickly grew exponentially, now serving customers across multiple continents. As a market leader in the surf industry within the e-commerce space, their website was lagging, proving unable to keep up with the volume of daily website traffic. With this in mind, a strong focus on international capability was of utmost importance for the website, whilst ensuring the brand integrity was not lost throughout the customer journey.

Concerns regarding cybersecurity were also voiced as this aspect of their infrastructure had previously not been given the attention it needed. As the demand exceeded their ability to scale, the server infrastructure was reaching its End of Life and began to strain. Addressing the combination of reliability and security risks posed to GSI were front of mind when suggesting any form of upgrade.

''Experience Digital helped us move off our old custom PHP infrastructure and into the cloud, putting us into the 21st century with a new relationship with AWS that saw our business handle elevated and burst traffic with no issues at all - they also supported us for years to come with upgrades towards localisation as our business grew from strength to strength''

Tess Kelly, Operations Manager

Our approach

Experience Digital’s main objective on this project was to establish a performance profile that enabled GSI’s web infrastructure the capability to handle the growing volume of global visitor traffic the business had afforded it. Despite the necessity for End of Life upgrades in relation to the aforementioned concerns, the considerable capital outlay associated with the refresh was a significant deterrence. Therefore, taking cost into account in the evaluation process was paramount in combination with assessing the technical and economic feasibility of multiple cloud service options.

As a result, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was selected for the world-leading service compounded with their robust API capabilities and enticing ‘pay for what you consume’ pricing model, which required no immediate outlay of cost. Most importantly, AWS services are prized for their scalability and global presence, streamlining the process of going global for its customers.

GSI was running operating systems and packages that were outdated, posing a significant risk. Experience Digital carefully undertook the process of transition that was premised strongly on business continuity and data security. This involved provisioning software upgrades and systematically migrating to take the cloud infrastructure live, with precise attention to detail taken to retire the obsolete infrastructure correctly.

The outcome

Since cloud migration, GSI has been extremely satisfied with the outcome of the serverless architecture implementation, enjoying increased performance and reliability that has exceeded the original project objectives. Due to the inherent focus on cost-saving and scalability within the project, the infrastructure has proved to serve their growing customer demand whilst simultaneously requiring no further capital investment. The flexibility of the serverless cloud architecture has allowed them to make adjustments to automatically meet demand spikes with ease.

Global Surf Industries has a continuing relationship with the Experience Digital team for service and ongoing support of its cloud infrastructure and global growth.