Artdeco Creations have grown to become Australia’s largest national distributor of stamping, scrapbooking and paper craft products.

The company moved to large new premises to help house the 25000+ stock lines the carry. Artdeco Creations business is conducted entirely online meaning uptime for the company’s website needs be 100%. However, this was far from being the case and with email and shared drives also previously running from the one place it would seem the combined effect on the business of the unreliable technology, was debilitating ‘We were being held back by our technology” says Chris Kirkby of Artdeco Creations.

The current Artdeco Creations infrastructure was unable to adequately scale to the growth and volume of the business. One option open to the company was to start down the long and expensive road of replacing their old technology with new. The obvious starting point was to purchase a new server but local Technology Solutions provider Cymax made an alternative suggestion of moving the business into the cloud; and this proved to be a real game changer for Artdeco Creations. “Moving to a scalable solution in the cloud means we don’t now need to purchase and maintain a stand-alone solution that would have cost around $30k, just for starters” Chris Kirkby of Artdeco Creations.

Another saving for Artdeco Creations came in the form of doing away with a dedicated separately provided internet line “We had a DSL line that ran to our server in Morningside but because of the speed and reliability of the cloud we no longer needed this which saved us another $600 per month” said Chris.

The Artdeco Creations website can have upward of 600 visitors online at the same time at any one time which equates to large spikes in bandwidth. This would be a challenge for the majority of stand-alone systems but not-so for Artdeco Creations now that they are in the cloud. “Access and speed of systems since we moved to the cloud has been greatly enhanced which has enabled us to do so much more than we could before” says Chris.

With details on millions of client transactions held in the Artdeco Creations system, security was previously becoming a concern for the company. Having previously initiated system back-ups manually to hard drives, theArtdeco Creations team were immediately impressed with the paradigm shift the cloud provided them with, “It’s such an advancement” says Chris, “Cymax gave us options around back-ups in the cloud and this is now automated very simply and safely in several locations which saves time and gives us real peace of mind” he added.

All business’ encounter unforeseen circumstances that they need to deal with as efficiently as possible. It could be said that in a challenging prevailing economic climate, any business that can quickly bounce back and adapt to change is likely to succeed “We recently had to re-build our database and with the old server that would have taken up to 2 weeks, amazingly in the cloud this took less than a day” said Chris. While a improvements were anticipated, Chris describes the reality of the transformation with vigour“Being in the cloud meant absolutely exponential gains in our situation”.

It would be fair assume that any new technology might come with concerns around teething troubles and any knock on effect on business continuity. The only real answer to this is a carefully implemented system, great IT tools and attentive support. According to Chris at Artdeco Creations, Cymax delivered all three “We’ve had no real issues and the planning and level of expertise and support from Cymax has been second to none” he said.

Having recently gone through the business transformation of moving Artdeco Creations into a cloud environment, Chris concluded by highlighting the key benefits companies doing the same might expect “I would have no hesitation in recommending the Phoenix cloud to any business looking to gain scalability, enhance productivity and make significant overall cost savings” he said. 

Download the Artdeco Creations Client (PDF) Testimonial