The client
Tesco is a British multinational grocery and general merchandise retailer and one of the largest retailers in the world by revenue, with operations spanning 13 countries.
tescoplc.com is the company’s public-facing corporate platform: the authoritative source of financial results, regulatory announcements, ESG reporting and governance information for shareholders, institutional investors, analysts, journalists and regulators worldwide.
With approximately 220,000 registered shareholders and stock among the most widely held in the UK, the platform carries significant weight. When Tesco publishes results or makes a material announcement, tescoplc.com is where the financial community goes first. For a FTSE-listed company, that makes availability a regulatory matter as much as a technical one: failure to publish reliably and on time carries legal and reputational consequences that go well beyond a service interruption.
The challenge
The tescoplc.com platform comprises six distinct sites spanning three separate Umbraco instances on Microsoft Azure, each with its own infrastructure and stakeholder group.
The whole estate sits behind Akamai, which is controlled and managed by Tesco directly. This architecture, including multiple CMS instances, third-party CDN ownership and varied stakeholder audiences, requires a support partner who can navigate complexity quickly, particularly during an incident.
Tesco’s digital agency partner, Radley Yeldar, did not have the capacity to provide out-of-hours or weekend cover. A series of recent outages had demonstrated the risk of that gap, and Tesco urgently needed a technical support team who could be stood up quickly, integrate cleanly with the existing agency relationship, and provide confidence that the platform would be monitored and protected around the clock.
The solution
Radley Yeldar recommended Just After Midnight based on an established working relationship, and JAM’s ability to mobilise rapidly was central to the decision. As certified Microsoft Azure and Umbraco engineers with hands-on experience across complex multi-instance CMS environments, we were able to onboard the full platform quickly and close the support gap before it caused further problems.
During onboarding, JAM mapped the full dependency landscape across all six sites: identifying key areas of functionality and the third-party integrations underpinning them, including the IFrame-based share price display and Umbraco Web Forms used for stakeholder-facing forms. This dependency mapping ensures that when an incident occurs, JAM’s team has the full picture immediately.
Monitoring was configured across the full stack: application-level checks across all six sites and their Umbraco instances, alongside infrastructure monitoring across the Azure environment. The Akamai CDN layer (owned and operated by Tesco) is factored into JAM’s incident response process, with clear escalation paths established to ensure CDN-related issues are triaged and communicated without delay.
For Tesco, the result is continuous coverage without gaps. JAM owns all out-of-hours monitoring, incident triage and escalation, ensuring that the platform and its stakeholder audience are never left exposed.
Results
- 99.99%+ uptime achieved over the past 12 months – an exceptional standard for a multi-instance, integration-dependent platform serving global investors and stakeholders
- All incidents detected in under 8 minutes, ensuring that any degradation in service is identified and acted upon before it can affect the platform’s audience
- Full dependency mapping completed during onboarding across all six sites, providing a baseline that continues to underpin faster, more accurate incident resolution
- Rapid mobilisation on engagement, addressing Tesco’s urgent requirement to close the out-of-hours support gap following recent outages
- An ongoing partnership sustained since 2021, with JAM continuing to provide round-the-clock coverage for one of the UK’s most prominent corporate platform
