All aboard the Cloud

With over 770 million passengers constantly on the move every year, Arriva bus has announced the launch of its new ecommerce platform, created by digital marketing specialist Freestyle Interactive and underpinned by Six Degrees Group’s high quality, resilient, secure hosting infrastructure. Six Degrees worked closely with Freestyle Interactive develop a solution that exactly matched Arriva bus’s requirements, designing a tailored dual-site private cloud solution. The ecommerce platform on Arriva bus’s website ensures passengers have access to ticket purchasing facilities on the go as well as up-to-the-minute service information and route details.

The ecommerce site designed by digital communications agency Freestyle Interactive works on a number of devices including iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. For Arriva bus, the update to the online ticketing facility is mission critical to its operations and reflects the increasing number of passengers who demand convenience as well as real-time access to bus information from mobile devices.

Six Degrees Group has deployed a secure and scalable hosting platform for the new ecommerce website, allowing Arriva bus to cope with a high volume of traffic. The private cloud solution created for Arriva bus is hosted on a dedicated rack in Six Degrees’ proprietary tier 4 data centre facility. To keep the website highly available and resilient, especially where payment data is concerned, the solution employs dual-site technology to cut the risk of potential downtime by mirroring the deployment on a secondary cloud platform in a geographically diverse location. Crucially, the solution allows for short-term bursts and long-term expansion as website traffic increases over time and as passengers access service information around the clock.

Freestyle Interactive technical director Paul Taylor said: “With the constant change and development in mobile technology we are seeing more and more demand for clients to have a payment system that their customers can access from the convenience of their home and on the move. This was the case for Arriva bus – it needed a ticketing option that its customers could access whilst travelling at any point of the day and at any location. Six Degrees Group was able to work with us to create and provide a hosting platform that met the brief and as mobile continues to increase in popularity this solution will become crucial to Arriva bus’s operations and to its customers.”

Campbell Williams, group strategy and marketing director, Six Degrees Group said: “When designing any website function it is important to develop a suitable hosting platform that takes into account the current and anticipated requirements of the website concerned. With 770 million passengers a year, it’s likely that the traffic to Arriva bus’s website is going to increase significantly so this solution needed to have the potential to scale up. Working with the expert web developers at Freestyle Interactive, it was possible to build a solution that is not only designed with future growth in mind, but also boasts inbuilt resilience, giving Arriva bus piece of mind that its website can deliver great customer service.”