With their expertise, they help companies optimize business processes and achieve maximum efficiency. However, their ambition extends beyond operational improvements: they strive to realize a sustainable competitive advantage for their customers through innovative technologies.

Orisha Commerce's rapid growth, partly due to several acquisitions led by MAIN Capital, brought about a huge complexity in their IT landscape. Each acquired entity had its own infrastructure, ranging from private datacenters and (virtual) private servers to different Azure tenants and product technologies. This diversity led to a fragmentation of their IT infrastructure, with several private datacenters spread across Equinix, NorthC and Leaseweb, in addition to their Azure environments.

One of the biggest challenges that the team of Rick Venema, CISO of Orisha Commerce faced was scaling their IT environment and developing a more enabling IT department. This included not only managing legacy systems, but also transitioning to modern, cloud-based solutions with a strong emphasis on Azure and Microsoft 365. The complexity of this diverse infrastructure became a barrier to the speed and agility of their operations, reinforcing the need for a streamlined, flexible and future-proof IT strategy.

A key aspect of Orisha Commerce’s IT strategy was to create a modular, standardized infrastructure that supported DevOps principles. This allowed them to separate the responsibility for infrastructure management from development activities, allowing developers to focus on building and innovating products, while infrastructure specialists remained responsible for the operations (Ops) side. This approach also made it easier to integrate new acquisitions and add-ons into their product portfolio, allowing value to be added faster and more efficiently.

Uniserver was selected as the primary partner for setting up a future-proof hybrid cloud environment. Orisha Commerce deliberately chose Uniserver because of their extensive standard services portfolio and proven expertise in delivering scalable and secure infrastructures. Furthermore, Uniserver, together with CloudNation, offered a unique combination of private and public cloud solutions, which proved to be a perfect match for Orisha Commerce's hybrid cloud needs.

Orisha Commerce now uses an unmanaged Virtual Datacenter for a large part of their IT environments, while a Managed Virtual Datacenter has been set up for their Kubernetes environments. In addition, the Uniconnect solution was implemented, a direct link between the Uniserver infrastructure and Azure, which further simplified the integration between private and public cloud.

One of the key benefits of the collaboration between Orisha Commerce, Uniserver and CloudNation was the development of an improved developer experience. The various acquisitions had resulted in a fragmented infrastructure with multiple Azure tenants and on-premise Active Directories. This resulted in a lack of consistency and scalability, which slowed down the development processes.

By joining forces, Orisha Commerce, Uniserver and CloudNation were able to address this fragmentation. This was done by, among other things, consolidating three different Azure tenants into a single environment and setting up a Microsoft Entra ID for better integration of on-premise Active Directory with the cloud environment. In addition, an MPLS network was set up between Orisha Commerce's various offices and Uniserver's IaaS environment, as well as an Azure ExpressRoute between the Uniserver platform and the Azure production environment. These steps not only ensured a stable, scalable infrastructure, but also gave the development teams the freedom to fully focus on building new products and innovations.

Uniserver and CloudNation’s approach offered specific advantages for Orisha Commerce's DevOps needs. Uniserver’s experience with a wide range of organizations allows them to provide support that is specifically tailored to the complex requirements of different industries. This means, among other things, that Uniserver has a team of highly qualified professionals who have a deep understanding of Orisha Commerce's operational requirements and challenges.

For Orisha Commerce, it is important to be able to rely on automated releases, rigorous quality control and resource flexibility. Uniserver's N-1 principle, which focuses on stability and consistency in their cloud designs, plays a crucial role in this. This enables Orisha Commerce to innovate quickly without compromising the quality or reliability of their infrastructure.

Orisha Commerce is confident about the future and has ambitious plans to further expand its cloud usage. The strategic partnership with Uniserver and CloudNation enables them to remain flexible in where their workloads run best, with a mix of private and public cloud solutions that promote scalability and innovation.

The collaboration between Orisha Commerce, Uniserver and CloudNation goes beyond a standard IT solution. It is a strategic partnership aimed at creating a robust, scalable infrastructure that supports Orisha Commerce in realizing their growth and innovation ambitions. By using both private and public cloud solutions, they have the flexibility and certainty they need to continue to grow in an ever-changing digital world.