Cartwheel: How to Scale Your Business with Managed IT

To manage your own virtual infrastructure is not always the best way — especially when your startup is very new to a market, and fast and hassle-free scalability is critical to your success. Managed IT service is specifically designed for businesses: to delegate all server administration tasks to external specialists and to focus on the company’s own goals and search for new clients.

Cartwheel: about the company

Cartwheel startup was founded in 2020 in the U.S. The company is the software developer for management of on-demand deliveries. Cartwheel products help logistic businesses to lower shipment overhead costs and to automate delivery, as well as to track drivers’ locations in real time.

The company’s virtual infrastructure is at Amazon Web Services. Cartwheel was searching for an outsource partner to support and develop the infrastructure — so that the company could focus on its immediate business processes.

Goals of the project

To provide the non-stop availability of services and to minimize risk of downtime Every hour of downtime can turn into a serious loss for a logistics product. Therefore a Managed IT provider has to assure the high fail safety and, in case of an incident, the prompt restoration of services.

To obtain fast scalability opportunities

Constantly growing number of clients asks for VMs quantity expansion and redundancy of micro-services. So the scalability speed is directly linked to the company’s business processes.

To find a partner with more flexible cooperation conditions — AWS pricing and impossibility to customize the existing tariff plans did not suit the startup management, so the decision was made to look for an external Managed IT provider.

Examining the market of cloud providers who offer the necessary set of services, Cartwheel had chosen Managed IT service from ITGLOBAL.COM.

Managed IT: about the service

Managed IT service suggests delegation of a client infrastructure management to a provider. The service consists of end-to-end monitoring, prompt dealing with malfunctions, as well as professional support on infrastructure scaling and development. Thus a client company eliminates the need for staff IT specialists and can concentrate on strategic tasks.

At the moment of addressing ITGLOBAL.COM, Cartwheel startup was at the expansive growth stage, having no possibility to spend on self-management of its virtual infrastructure — while the client’s at-that-time provider was unable to offer more profitable cooperation. The client also had doubts that AWS will be capable of providing sufficient uptime of Cartwheel services.

Service implementation

The client had submitted the exhaustive layout of its services, including geographical locations, bandwidth capacity data and full complementary paperwork. It resulted in comprehension of the client’s infrastructure specifics and, subsequently, fast service implementation. After signing the Contract ITGLOBAL.COM IT specialists were granted access to the serviceable infrastructure.

ITGLOBAL.COM technical team set up the monitoring system and the customized infrastructure health model. They also performed the end-to-end audit that pinpointed and allowed to get rid of “white spots” in the 1st line support manuals.

This made it possible to virtually eliminate the client’s participation in case of incidents. As well, the process of virtual machines’ backup was automated — previously it had to be done manually.

The key metric of successful cooperation is shortened VMs’ and applications’ deployment time due to automation of routine processes.

The client’s migration to Managed IT service ran in full accordance to the procedure standard. Responsibility areas of the contractor and the client are fixed in SLA. Thus, ITGLOBAL.COM is responsible for the following:

• logging, paperwork and description of the client’s IT operations;
• incident response (1st and 2nd lines of support);
• updates of software and server systems.

In the future Cartwheel is planning to widen a pool of infrastructure systems and objects that are serviced in the framework of Managed IT.