Australian furniture disruptor optimizes customer experience with DoiT cloud expertise

December 2023

Koala strengthens security, reduces costs, and prepares for global expansion with comprehensive cloud support

$6,000: saved to date
2 hours: weekly time savings

“DoiT has really helped our security practices. Together, we went on a journey to strengthen our overall security and tighten up those loose ends that show up in IT operations over time. DoiT took the burden off our shoulders and supported us through the more challenging security monitoring and notification work.”
Andrew Sladen
Director of Software Engineering, Koala

The Challenge

Maintaining exceptional customer experience across digital services required significant time and resources. Koala needed expertise in infrastructure management, site monitoring, and security practices to support growth while protecting customer data and ensuring optimal digital shopping experiences.

The Solution

DoiT became Koala's multi-cloud partner, starting with an AWS Well-Architected Framework review. The partnership included infrastructure optimization, security hardening, DevOps workshops, automated cost optimization, and implementation of monitoring best practices across AWS and Google Cloud environments.

Results

Saved up to $6,000 through automated cost optimization of CPU usage
Reduced weekly manual optimization work by 2 hours through automation
Hardened security profile with industry best practices across all AWS workloads
Lowered carbon emissions through optimized workloads and reduced compute usage
Increased deployment speed for new products and features

Meet Koala

In an industry where overpriced products, long delivery waits, and narrow returns policies can leave customers feeling like an afterthought, online Australian furniture disruptor Koala makes a point of treating its customers like its mates. From quality products at an affordable price to four-hour delivery windows and risk-free 120-night trials, the customer experience is essential to Koala's business model.

Refining the digital product with a customer-first mindset

With DoiT's expertise, the Koala team worked on both its cloud infrastructure and its work practices to ensure it was able to continue offering the best digital product to its customers. As well as advising Koala on implementing the latest cloud technology, DoiT also helped Koala to implement best practices in monitoring site performance issues and fixing them responsively as they arose. With the help of DoiT's DevOps expertise and workshops, Koala also increased the speed at which it could execute new developments, enabling the Koala team to deploy new products and features to customers as fast as possible.

Adopting industry best practice to harden the security profile

With a vast amount of customer financial data in its possession, Koala takes security seriously. Following DoiT's Well-Architected Framework review of its AWS infrastructure, DoiT and Koala began a series of weekly sessions to work through ways to bolster Koala's security profile. This included making numerous valuable security improvements to Koala's infrastructure, as well as ensuring that Koala's security monitoring and alerting procedures aligned to AWS best practices. As a result, Koala was able to implement the most effective security policies to cover its AWS workloads.

Optimizing compute spend with DoiT cost optimization

With DoiT, Koala was able to automatically optimize its compute spend. By analyzing its CPU usage, DoiT gave Koala clear insights into its AWS and Google Cloud workloads to assess where usage could be optimized and costs could be saved, giving Koala the flexibility to manage its cloud usage without making expensive commitments. DoiT cost optimization is a unique offering that helped Koala put various savings mechanisms in place to help optimize their bill automatically, without having to remember to keep putting these policies in place.

Preparing for global expansion

Koala is now in a position to consider expanding into new regions, and is confident that the partnership with DoiT is the foundation the company needs to make the move a success. If Koala expands into new markets, it will take care and thought to make sure they have the right content delivery and configuration policies in each region. With DoiT, Koala knows they have the support needed to set things up correctly for each new region, so that they can continue building the best digital product for their customers.

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Story overview

What they say

DoiT was a true partner, not a vendor. They helped us understand the problem, refine the vision, and build something production-ready far faster than we could have on our own. Their expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made all the difference.

Dr. Anish Kapur, Founder & CEO, Promptly

DoiT's Customer Success and Forward Deployed Engineering teams work very closely with us. The regular sessions with our CSM keep us focused on the right priorities, and the FDEs provide the deep technical guidance we need to validate decisions and optimize our environment. That combination has been genuinely valuable for us.

Alexander Lundberg Santos, Platform Engineer at Extenda Retail

When we started working with DoiT, we deployed Flexsave to save time and reduce complexity. We still use it today. But what really stands out is the expert support. Having someone to collaborate with on deep cloud cost topics, someone who really understands the nuances, is incredibly valuable.

Jesper Terkelsen, CTO at Monta

DoiT's Cloud Accelerator turned our AI idea into a shipped product, saving at least three months of development and delivering reliable, explainable insights our customers trust.

Scott Desgrosseilliers, CEO and co-founder, Wicked Reports

DaySmart

Working with DoiT gave us the speed of a startup and the rigor of an enterprise R&D lab. We launched an AI feature in ninety days with zero engineering lift, unified our cloud visibility across multiple products and built a foundation to scale AI responsibly.

Tim Green, SVP of AI, DaySmart

Our AWS environment had grown rapidly, and complexity was outpacing control. DoiT helped us bring structure and clarity, aligning financial and technical decisions through a shared foundation.

Maurizio Trezzi, Director of IT, Vivaticket

DoiT gives us contextual insight into what's happening in our cloud environment. That helps us ensure we're meeting customer needs while managing our costs. It's that central pane of glass that lets engineering and finance work together, powered by the technology and backed by DoiT's people.

Matt Warner, Co-Founder and CEO at Blumira

For anyone considering DoiT: do it. The tools pay for themselves. We've reduced costs, improved visibility, and built a platform that can scale globally with control and confidence.

Matej Serbec, CTO, TradeLocker

DoiT didn't just give us a product – they gave us clarity. Cloud Diagrams has helped our teams understand what we're running, why we're running it, and where we can improve. The real-time visibility is a game changer for engineering, leadership, and everything in between.

Donnie Green, VP of Platform Engineering, Bloomerang

Sentric Music

With maybe 5-10 minutes, Ava had guided me right down into the low-level detail of the services that we were running in our compute environment, named the exact instances that were starting to chew through our money, produced a report for me that showed that this was almost a direct correlation to the cost growth that we were seeing, which meant that we were able to get on top of it pretty much immediately.

Stephen Roughley, Head of Engineering at Sentric Music

Atadex

With DoiT Cloud Intelligence™ managing our procurement and DoiT's engineers acting as an extension of my team, my costs are down, my efficiency is up, and my profitability is up

Mitch Bernet, Founder and CEO at Atadex

Skyral

A key takeaway for me working with DoiT is that the level of professionalism is extremely high. They're an obvious choice if you're looking for a partner to help implement best practices in your cloud environment and reduce cost.

Oliver Young, Senior Technical Manager at Skyral

We knew WhatsApp was the perfect channel for global remittances, but building secure, real-time conversations across languages was a massive challenge. DoiT helped us break through. They didn't just advise, they helped us architect and launch a GenAI solution that's 100x more powerful than what we had. We're now in a completely different league.

Jaime Gonzalez-Gasque, CEO, Reimagination Technologies

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