Cherri

Founded in 2015, Cherri Tech has won the favor from many well-known e-commerce brands and large enterprises with its payment product – TapPay – which offers a complete and seamless payment service. At the beginning of its establishment, Cherri Tech had chosen to run its system on AWS, yet the main challenge was the speed and stability of transaction connections. Afterwards, Cherri Tech decided to deploy AWS Direct Connect, the virtual private connection solution, via Chief Cloud eXchange (CCX), and this has shown several immediate benefits.

Fintech has disrupted the traditional financial services with innovation and become an unstoppable trend. Founded in 2015, Cherri Tech has won the favor from many well-known e-commerce brands and large enterprises with its payment product – TapPay – which offers a complete and seamless payment service. In the meantime, Cherri Tech also continues to deepen the content of their services, and has developed advanced mechanisms of counterfeiting and fraud prevention and transaction risk monitoring. At the beginning of its establishment, Cherri Tech had chosen to run its system on AWS, yet the main challenge was the speed and stability of transaction connections. Afterwards, Cherri Tech decided to deploy AWS Direct Connect, the virtual private connection solution, via Chief Cloud eXchange (CCX), and this has shown several immediate benefits.

“A good payment system cannot afford to be interrupted, and we need a high-quality, dedicated link to provide stable services in order to fulfill our 99.99% SLA. After deploying AWS Direct Connect, it has completely solved the packet loss problem we encountered when connecting using public internet. It has not only saved us from customer complaints, but also won us customer recognition with improvement on network speed and stability,” said Joseph Liao, VP of Merchant Business of Cherri Tech.

From the left: Joseph Liao, Cherri Tech’s VP of Merchant Business and Sophia Wu, Sales Directort of eCloudvalley.

No more packet loss plus a 90% decrease on network latency

Cherri Tech’s customer profile covers from online payment to offline QRcode scanning, and from online e-commerce to offline channels. Others include famous brands in the insurance and travel industries, such as Carrefour, FamilyMart’s My Famipay, PChome, Yahoo Shopping Mall and so on. Cherri Tech uses a single API to incorporate 6 payment methods, 15 acquirer banks, and 5 card-issuing institutions. They do not only build the transaction mechanism based on EMVCo standards, but also provide advanced risk management for banks.

Before deploying AWS Direct Connect, Cherri Tech had been transferring transaction data using public internet and VPN. However, packet loss is an inevitable problem they faced when using public internet. In average, more than 10 pieces of data would be lost out of 10,000 transactions, and they could only take care of these exceptions by programming. As for VPN, though it is safer and simpler to use when connecting with AWS, the transmitting speed and quality still couldn’t meet Cherri Tech’s requirement.

In August, 2019, Cherri Tech solved all the above problems when their AWS Direct Connect through Chief Cloud eXchange (CCX) went live. “We tested the connection for three months with Chief Telecom and eCloudvalley, and the result was satisfying. Not to mention the other benefits, the network latency is only 10% of what we had before. Others such as network stability and security all met our expectation. The most noteworthy point is that there haven’t been any packet loss situations after the deployment,” commented Joseph Liao.

Chief cloud eXchange (CCX)

The reason why Cherri Tech is much concerned with network latency is that it will directly affect the response speed of transactions. If each transaction has the network latency of 1 second, when server is handling transaction data, the latency will continue to add up and cause connection resource occupation of the system. It will directly affect user experience, and indirectly increase risks of transaction interruption; both can possibly lead to customer complaints and the intricate resolving process that follows.

Partner with the professionals to strengthen network operations

In the past, Cherri Tech had considered about connecting with AWS directly, yet the minimum bandwidth was 1 Gbps and required two links for redundancy, which was too huge an investment for them to continue with the plan.

eCloudvalley, Cherri Tech’s AWS technical consulting partner and Chief Telecom’s long-time channel partner, came into play at this moment and introduced the whole new AWS Direct Connect service to Cherri Tech, and solved their problem of transaction connection quality.

The major challenge faced by Cherri Tech’s technical team was that they were less familiar with the deployment of dedicated physical links. Therefore, in order to implement AWS Direct Connect, they needed to spend much time understanding the network topology. For this part, Chief Telecom offered their full and timely assistance.

“Major e-commerce brands and channels all have the requirements to connect using dedicated links, yet the configuration, location and ISP of their IDC are all different. We need to design each customer’s network topology independently and make sure their links don’t affect each other. Fortunately, Chief Telecom assisted us with the design of network topology and tested the links between us and our customers. Their response time and speed of dealing with problems are very satisfying, too,” said Joseph Liao.

A noteworthy point is that the system environment of Cherri Tech’s TapPay passed PCIDSS Level 1, which is the highest security certificate level, and it shows how important security is to Cherri Tech. Through the cooperation with Chief Telecom, not only the network transmission stability has been ensured, the network speed and response time improved, but the dedicated link of AWS Direct Connect has made the network environment relatively simple and thus greatly improved the security level.

Continuous fulfillment of service quality and high growth goals

“1111” promotion is a major yearly event for e-commerce, and the transaction volume of 2019 has substantially increased compared with that of 2018. However, the platforms that Cherri Tech provides services to handled the transaction even more smoothly, and didn’t have any errors during peak hours.

Deploying the direct connection service from CCX has shown great benefits to Cherri Tech’s customers. Even with surging network traffic, the transfer quality stays stable. The technical team of Cherri Tech also experience the benefits as they don’t have to spend extra time dealing with problems caused by network slowness or interruption.

Cherri Tech, with great growth momentum, now provides services to around 8,000 e-commerce websites and 5,000 offline sites. To fulfill their active growth goals of 2020, Cherri Tech will recruit more network application experts to work together.

“To any network service that requires stability, high volume of traffic and zero interruption, the direct connection service provided by CCX is definitely a worth-considering investment. Our growth goals will continuously elevate our requirement for network bandwidth, quality and stability. With eCloudvalley and Chief Telecom’s technical assistance and the deployment of AWS Direct Connect, we can strive for growth with no worries,” concluded Joseph Liao.

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