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Castorama Moves to CROC Cloud to Expand Online Business in Russia
Castorama—part of Kingfisher Group and one of Europe’s largest retailers of DIY and home improvement tools and supplies—has expanded its business in Russia and launched an online product catalog powered by CROC’s virtual infrastructure. Customers can now place their orders anytime, anywhere, and from any digital device, with almost all items being available for online ordering
Over 1.5 million people use the Castorama online catalog monthly, with growing demand for e-retail services and an increasing number of website visitors requiring a reliable platform capable of withstanding load fluctuations. As a result, the retailer decided to move its catalog to the CROC cloud in order to promote digital services to its Russian customers.
Continuous monitoring of key web catalog components and technical support from CROC on a single-point-of-contact basis guarantee high availability of the online service. In addition, cloud infrastructure is provided to Castorama as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) based on CROC’s commercial data centers, including Kompressor Data Center, which has been awarded Tier III Gold Certification for Operational Sustainability from the Uptime Institute, a leading global expert in data center standardization.
«The project required step-by-step coordination and the establishment of efficient communications among our partners, internal business units, and foreign contractors. The cohesive performance of CROC’s project team guarantees continuous availability of this online service to our customers. CROC adapted the website to the cloud, designed a fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure, and implemented monitoring of business-critical components. The solution architecture proposed by CROC has made our business more digital, provided us with powerful OPEX management tools, and ensured proper efficiency and reliability,» says Dmitry Fedorov, IT Director, Castorama.
Availability of the retailer’s website is monitored by an open-source managed service while, during peak loads, IT staff response time for business-critical incidents is reduced to 10 minutes, thus ensuring that the online service is up and running at all times. Moreover, new services for the online catalog can be quickly added and fine-tuned in test environments. As a result, the customer now enjoys a flexible and powerful infrastructure tailored to the developers’ needs.
«We are delighted that Castorama, one of the largest retailers in Europe, chose CROC cloud as a platform for its new online service, engaged us to create infrastructure for its online catalog in Russia and, furthermore, outsourced monitoring and continuous support to our team, which has helped the retailer expand its business and become even more customer-focused. CROC cloud compatibility with Amazon Web Services is another advantage for international companies, enabling them to easily build the required infrastructure using customary tools,» says Maxim Berezin, Cloud Service Development Director, CROC.
About Castorama
Castorama, one of the world’s largest home improvement retailers, is part of Kingfisher Group and specializes in helping people create their dream homes and making home improvement affordable. We are committed to our customers at all times and our mission is to improve people’s lives by offering greater choice and opportunities through an extensive product range and a Low Price Every Day policy.
Castorama serves people looking to redecorate their flats or cottages, build houses, or develop their land plots, and is also a good choice for professional builders. In Russia, Castorama stores operate in Moscow and the Moscow Region, Saint Petersburg, Perm, Samara, Togliatti, Rostov-on-Don, Omsk, Krasnodar, Voronezh, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Orenburg.
