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Colibri Guarantees Secure Customer Access to Essential Ticketing Platform

The Live Sales Management (LSM) service is a key component of the Ticket on Departure feature offered by National Rail, part of the Rail Delivery Group. It enables customers to purchase tickets online or via third parties in advance and collect them at their convenience. Managed by Colibri, LSM plays a vital role in improving both customer convenience and operational efficiency.

Client
National Rail
Duration
Date
Partner
AWS

The client

To maintain high standards of security, availability, and cost-effectiveness, aligned with cloud best practices, Colibri recently proposed a system-wide network modernisation project.

LSM continues to meet growing consumer expectations for flexibility, convenience, and efficiency. As a trusted service, RDG was committed to ensuring secure, stable access to the platform at all times.

To support this goal, the network modernisation project focused on strengthening LSM’s resilience through improved routing, ensuring reliable performance even under adverse conditions or peak demand. The initiative also included updated security measures, aligned with RDG’s guidelines, to safeguard customer data and prevent unauthorised access to critical systems.

In parallel with the infrastructure modernisation, Colibri worked to improve access for RDG’s third-party clients. This included simplifying connectivity, enhancing availability and fault tolerance, and reducing the need for ongoing support and service requests.

Solution

Senior Service Manager
Rail Delivery Group (RDG)

"RDG and Colibri have engaged regularly for several years now. This time around, Colibri's continued focus on helping us achieve customer satisfaction with the latest technology has resulted in a future-proof and resilient platform for RDG and the wider transportation community. This is exactly why Colibri is our preferred AWS partner."

Simplifying connectivity for a modern network

To address the identified challenges, Colibri launched a comprehensive modernisation strategy. Solution Architects conducted an in-depth analysis and pinpointed key areas for improvement, focusing on network upgrades, enhanced security, and greater system availability.

The LSM service, hosted primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS), leverages cloud scalability to deliver both resilience and high availability. As part of the modernisation, the project introduced additional cloud-managed services and infrastructure enhancements.

Key among these were the implementation of dynamically scaling Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) and Network Load Balancers(NLBs). These services enable horizontal scaling while maintaining availability and supporting static IP addressing, critical for customers using IP allow-listing as part of their security framework.

Network modernisation

To replace legacy virtual machines used for static IP endpoints, Colibri implemented Network Load Balancers (NLBs) with Elastic IP addresses. This shift introduced dynamic scaling for the load-balancing tier and enabled advanced features such as configurable TLS settings, ensuring encryption in transit and improved performance for third-party access.

System optimisation

Futureproofing IT systems: In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Colibri ensured the LSM service remains secure, resilient, and adaptable by incorporating best-in-class cloud technologies, positioning RDG to deliver reliable service well into the future.

Reducing complexity: The removal of self-managed virtual machines and underutilised resources simplified the network architecture and reduced potential points of failure.

Rightsizing infrastructure: Resources were scaled to match actual demand, avoiding overprovisioning and underutilisation, while still benefiting from AWS’s auto-scaling capabilities.

Enhanced security: Migrating to a fully managed service for access point load balancing removed the need for manual configurations, significantly lowering security risks and the chance of human error.

Improved availability and user experience: With Colibri’s Next Generation Managed Services in place, patching downtime has been minimised and system availability assured - enhancing the overall user experience.

Results

Enhancing experiences, costs, and security

Enhanced customer experience
By ensuring the availability, reliability, and security of the LSM service, the modernisation project directly improves the customer experience. This encourages greater use of rail services, ultimately driving increased ticket sales and revenue.

Cost-effectiveness
The optimisation of network infrastructure, especially through the adoption of cloud services and automation, reduces the need for manual intervention and enables scalable, efficient resource usage, delivering long-term cost savings.

Compliance and security

By aligning with current security standards and best practices, the solution helps protect RDG against cyber threats and ensures ongoing compliance with regulatory requirements.

Our solution

The outcome

Faster insights

Reduced to within 6-second lead time

Improved customer service

Faster predictions on customers' needs and capturing new opportunities

Team growth where it matters

+ 20 headcount in the data team

What others have to say

"The goal of this project was to reduce risk, improve flexibility, boost efficiency and performance, manage costs, and future-proof the platform for RDG’s LSM service. This kind of innovative thinking and expert guidance is why we continue to trust Colibri with our cloud infrastructure. This migration has not only lowered our costs but also increased visibility, improved reporting and helped to identify new opportunities."

"RDG and Colibri have engaged regularly over the last four years about re-scaling the LSM service. Colibri provided RDG a number of key opportunities that would enhance efficiency, cost, and performance - one of which was the database migration for an AWS Aurora Database. Since the migration, we have noticed cost savings and a 10% transactional performance improvement. Together with this change being an enabler for other service improvements, it also future-proofs the RDG environment."

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