APG|SGA Leads the Charge to AWS Switzerland

APG|SGA SA is an established and well-known brand in Switzerland. Founded in 1900, APG|SGA SA is Switzerland’s biggest out-of-home media advertiser. With over 480 employees, APG|SGA SA offers digital, analogue, mobile and interactive advertising solutions in public spaces. Go anywhere in Switzerland and you’ll see an APG|SGA managed outdoor advertising space. APG|SGA has ad space on streets and squares, on public transportation, at railway stations, at airports, shopping centers and even in the mountains. 

Divio and APG|SGA SA started their collaboration back in 2012. At that time, Divio was engaged to help APG|SGA SA with their new web presence and cloud hosting solution. Divio has helped APG|SGA SA with infrastructure performance optimization, application orchestration and application security ever since. For over a decade, APG|SGA SA has reliably run their web applications on Public Cloud solutions through the Divio PaaS.

20 years ago, public media advertising still mostly consisted of gluing traditional posters onto a billboard. This practice still exists today, but the go-to method of reaching advertising audiences now is massive screens and interactive advertising through mobile apps. Such technological change brought with it a seachange in how customers select and purchase their advertising space. 

APG|SGA SA transformed their sales and customer success processes into digital experiences and remains the dominant player in Switzerland because of, among other things, being early adopters. Today, APG|SGA SA customers can easily select the type of media advertising, the ad location, ad display frequency and ad duration with a few clicks, all according to their budget. Customers’ orders are processed automatically and at any time of the day or night. Of course, APG|SGA SA also offers dedicated account management services at one of eighteen locations across Switzerland or on-site at a customers’ business premises.

For modern media advertising companies like APG|SGA SA, a significant part of their revenue stream comes from online sales through their business-critical web applications. Therefore, the web applications’ accessibility and reliability is key. Companies like APG|SGA SA require strict service level expectations to be met in order to protect their revenue streams and reputations. 

APG|SGA SA develops, deploys and manages all their web applications with help of the Divio PaaS. The Divio PaaS’s tools and features, including zero-downtime-deployment workflows, automatic backup and restore as well as logs and metrics, help APG|SGA SA’s application development partners on a daily basis. Divio’s many features enable and support efficient work and minimal to no service interruptions to the web applications. 

Another crucial aspect in terms of reliability is the underlying cloud infrastructure and choosing a reliable cloud provider. APG|SGA SA selected AWS from the beginning. During the last few years, Divio has been managing a dedicated, isolated cloud infrastructure for APG|SGA SA’s web applications on AWS in the Frankfurt DE region, with a historic uptime of 100%.

For Swiss companies, the location of their own and their stakeholders' data matters. Even though the laws and regulations around data protection (e.g. GDPR) and data privacy are strictly regulated and controlled within the EU and European Economic Area EEA, Swiss legal entities often prefer to have their data stored within Switzerland. APG|SGA SA’s compliance policies and procedures do not exclude using any European based cloud region from AWS. However, being able to use the AWS Swiss region is the best and the preferred solution. Having a local AWS region has an added benefit too. It will also minimize latency in APG|SGA SA’s most important geographical market: Switzerland. 

Divio looks forward to commissioning, configuring and managing the new AWS Swiss region for APG|SGA SA when it becomes available. With Divio’s CloudShift feature, migration from the existing AWS Frankfurt region to the new AWS Swiss region will take one click.