Construction Materials Online (CMO)
CMO (Construction Materials Online) is a leading supplier of construction materials in the UK. Since 2008, they have combined expert product knowledge with online retail to deliver materials for roofing, insulation, drainage, and more. CMO focuses on supporting British manufacturing and innovation, but also connects all parts of the construction industry with leading global brands and materials.
With an estimated 1.5-2 million visits per month over 3 e-commerce websites, CMO created a 3-year growth plan to meet the needs of an anticipated increase in traffic and future expansion.
Challenge
After creating their growth plan, CMO realised that a few changes could help them reach their goals, namely, increasing security to reach PCI compliance level one hosting and increasing speed and performance across all three websites. Having each of the three websites on different platforms with separate servers made security updates and maintenance difficult to manage. They were concerned that their database and servers on their e-commerce sites wouldn’t be able to keep pace with increased traffic.
An additional challenge was the ever-evolving e-commerce security regulations. CMO wanted to achieve PCI level one compliance across all their websites so they could continue to honour a commitment to safely storing & processing client information. Keeping up-to-date with PCI-DSS requirements for all three sites was a difficult task for their IT personnel to manage alone.
Solution
The solution designed for CMO included:
- Building and launching a new software platform to host all 3 websites
- Ongoing IT support from dedicated SysGroup technicians
- Ongoing maintenance and security updates
- PCI-DSS level one compliance across all 3 websites
- Quarterly DCI scans
- Private cloud network to streamline data storage and hosting
Result
The team from CMO described the following improvements:
- Less worry about fixing abnormalities, taking the problems out of CMO’s hands
- Expertise & recommendations from reliable expert technicians
- Increased speed & better uptime
- Software now consistently has the latest security patches (esp. PCI compliance)
- Time saved by not managing servers
- 60-70% increase in web traffic during the 12 months after implementation
- Able to fulfil more orders than before
