ibelsa enhances scalability and security with Skaylink on AWS

ibelsa was an early adopter of cloud solutions in the hotel industry. “I come from a family of hoteliers, so I grew up in the hotel business,” says Philipp Berchtold, managing director and cofounder of ibelsa. “Many years ago, I realized that cloud solutions could bring hotels into the digital age.” The team understood that cloud infrastructure was the future of the hotel business. And for a company that acts in part as a data hub, scalability is particularly essential. ibelsa’s cloud-based property management system (PMS) underpins core hotel operations for customers across more than 30 countries, with a focus on Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The PMS supports critical processes such as reservations, check-in and checkout, pricing, reporting, and integrations with third-party systems, which all require high performance and reliability.

As usage and customer demand grew, however, ibelsa noticed performance and reliability issues with its PMS. The company’s customer base had grown by around 35–40 percent per year since the COVID-19 pandemic, straining the system. ibelsa’s spikes include daily check-in and checkout times, in addition to reporting and invoicing times. The infrastructure lacked elasticity, and manual scaling resulted in periods of suboptimal performance that affected the user experience. To handle peak traffic, the company was paying for extra capacity units even when it wasn’t using them. Knowing it could get more out of the cloud, ibelsa looked for a way to modernize and optimize its solution.

ibelsa approached Skaylink, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with extensive experience in operational excellence in the cloud through AWS Managed Services. Together, the teams planned a migration to more scalable, reliable, manageable infrastructure that is built on AWS services to reduce costs, improve security posture, and meet performance requirements. After detailed discussions to understand business needs, Skaylink outlined a proposal that included infrastructure management. “You need to come together and trust each other to reach the right technical solution, and we have this trust with Skaylink,” says Berchtold.

To improve performance, Skaylink built a multicluster architecture, with discrete, dedicated clusters for frontend, API, and background-processing workloads. The partner used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling to help maintain application availability. This way, ibelsa could achieve predictive and auto scaling for daily peaks and elastic scaling for monthly invoicing and reporting workloads. To reduce the load on backend databases, Skaylink also introduced load balancers to distribute network traffic across multiple servers and cache systems.

Skaylink strengthened security by building multilayered protection against distributed denial of service events, with options to increase resilience during key business times. By implementing AWS WAF, the partner helped ibelsa control bot traffic and block common threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting.

By migrating to AWS, ibelsa has improved the performance, scalability, and reliability of its solution. Its modernized infrastructure provides a stable foundation for its PMS, supporting consistent performance and achieving virtually zero downtime during peak times. As a result, ibelsa can better support its customers’ day-to-day operations, particularly during business-critical moments such as hotel check-in and checkout. For efficient workload management, the new solution keeps CPU usage within 40–60 percent through dynamic resource allocation and auto scaling, with the capability to scale from 3 to up to 25 instances. By moving away from static capacity provisioning, ibelsa reduced infrastructure costs while gaining the flexibility that the business needs to grow and has been able to handle 35–40 percent annual customer growth since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Skaylink helps ibelsa gain greater visibility into infrastructure and address potential issues quickly by offering all-day managed service coverage, monitoring, and event response. Running its infrastructure as a managed service, ibelsa is freeing its team to focus on innovation, develop new features, and deliver value to customers. “With a solution that’s designed to grow alongside the business without introducing operational complexity, we’ve expanded to a team of more than 50 people,” says Berchtold.

Skaylink, based in Germany, has completed hundreds of AWS migration and modernization projects across sectors.