Founded in 2002, SECUTIX has experience managing the extreme demand spikes that are common in the ticketing business, when eventgoers rush to buy tickets for popular events as soon as they go on sale.

Event organizers can sell hundreds of concert tickets a minute. For the European Football Championship 2020, over 1 million mobile tickets were delivered on TIXNGO. Sixty percent of these were downloaded to the app within 1 hour.

Using AWS, SECUTIX customers can quickly scale up compute power before an event to meet predicted demand. The platform automatically adds resources during the event and returns to normal levels at quieter times. This provides fast, reliable performance for ticket buyers and also proves cost-effective for customers.

To scale for traffic spikes and provide a smooth experience for ticket buyers, SECUTIX uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven computer service. It also uses the content delivery network Amazon CloudFront, which serves web assets to customers in a timely manner, regardless of traffic levels.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform adapted easily to changing demand when live events were cancelled. SECUTIX and its customers scaled down resources to save money during the downturn. They were also ready to instantly scale up again to meet the needs of customers selling tickets to streaming events. For instance, SECUTIX supported ticketing for a live event streamed to Colombian audiences, smoothly handling ticket sales and delivery for more than 5,000 customers who purchased tickets in a short space of time before accessing the stream.

SECUTIX chose AWS so that it can focus on its core business of creating a first-rate experience for ticket sellers and buyers. “We’ve been using AWS since 2018,” says Frédéric Longatte, chief executive officer (CEO) of SECUTIX. “Initially, we chose AWS because it’s a major player in the cloud computing market. Now, the cost savings, scalability, stability, and global reach have fully justified that decision. Using AWS, we can focus on pleasing our customers and their customers, too—the people buying tickets.”

It’s the company’s ability to satisfy the needs of the eventgoers purchasing tickets that contributes to its long-term success. “Today, there are lots of options for selling tickets online,” says Laurent Prat, head of cloud consulting at ELCA Cloud Services. ELCA, an AWS Partner, is the parent company of SECUTIX and manages its infrastructure. “Providing an excellent end-user experience is what sets us apart and gives SECUTIX a competitive advantage.”

One way SECUTIX accomplishes this is by providing customers with extensive data about their fan bases. They can analyze this information to tailor marketing campaigns to their fans’ individual needs and create personalized offers and messages. Customer data is stored on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud, and on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service.

SECUTIX aims to manage ticketing for sellers wherever they and their target audiences are located. The global reach of AWS supports SECUTIX’s ambitions.

To comply with local data protection regulations and to safeguard customer data, SECUTIX relies on AWS. In Europe, for instance, using AWS helps make it simpler for SECUTIX to meet regulatory requirements for EU Data Protection and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Because the ticketing company processes large numbers of payments, it also needs to be payment card industry (PCI) compliant. AWS is certified as a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider, the highest level of assessment available, which means SECUTIX can rely on AWS to manage its PCI DSS compliance certification.

Also, being able to serve content from local data centers reduces latency because data is stored as close to the customer as possible. This provides a reliable, efficient ticket-buying experience, regardless of where the purchasers reside.

In addition, the availability of global AWS resources gives SECUTIX confidence that it can rapidly deploy infrastructure to support customers in new markets such as Australia, providing the same high levels of performance as in Europe.

To secure transactions and customer data, SECUTIX follows best practices on security from AWS, including encrypting data and putting in place safeguards to protect infrastructure from attacks. It uses Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, to monitor its AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and receive detailed security findings for visibility and remediation.

Its TIXNGO mobile ticketing app also leverages the encryption and security of blockchain technology to provide secure ticket distribution from smartphones. This helps customers combat ticket fraud and unauthorized reselling, which are ongoing challenges in the industry.

SECUTIX also uses a wide range of AWS solutions to provide a secure experience for TIXNGO customers. This includes authentication using Amazon API Gateway to create, secure, and maintain APIs and AWS Cognito to implement secure, frictionless customer identity and access management. For running ad-hoc fraud detection, it uses Amazon Fargate, which provides serverless compute for containers. And for content encryption and restricting viewer access, it uses Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service.

Operating in the competitive online ticketing market, SECUTIX needs to be able to focus on developing its platform and capabilities. Using AWS supports this requirement because the IT team can spend minimal time on infrastructure management. “We’ve gained business agility, because on AWS we now have well-understood and predictable costings, and the proven benefits of scalability and stability,” says Abdel Zerigue, head of cloud operations at SECUTIX. “Our teams are innovative and productive because AWS maintains more than 1,000 infrastructure services and products for us, so we can concentrate on adding new capabilities.”

SECUTIX is on a journey to a cloud-native future. It plans to continue to reduce its use of legacy technology and move more workloads to AWS. “SECUTIX is always looking for ways to modernize its platform and deliver the best experience to its customers,” says Prat. “The services and support that AWS provides make all of this achievable.”