Luxury Retailer Elevates Digital Transformation with Cloud

Brief 

A luxury retailer successfully harnessed the cloud for their digital transformation. By migrating and re-platforming their central POS solution to the cloud, they were able to they were able to continue to engage with their customers by providing exceptional omnichannel experiences.

About the client

Headquartered in London, the client is a British luxury fashion house established in the mid-1800s. It currently designs and distributes ready to wear, leather accessories, and footwear. Operating globally, the client has close to 250 retail stores, including standalone stores, department store concessions, and outlets.

The client has been at the forefront in integrating digital technology into their brand strategy. They leverage social media, live-streaming fashion shows, and interactive campaigns to connect with their audiences and craft captivating digital experiences. In keeping with their customer focus, the client chose to elevate their digital transformation with the cloud.

The client partnered with SkillNet, a cloud expert with a successful track record of retail systems cloud migration.

Opportunity

The client was looking to harness the cloud for their digital transformation program with a focus on increasing agility, optimization, and risk reduction. This would pave the way for the client to continue to create innovative customer experiences to elevate their commerce journey. Therefore, the cloud program was driven by several key objectives.

The first objective was to enable business transformation by migrating the central POS solution from its current on-prem environment. The client was looking for a like-to-like approach, to ensure a smooth and seamless transition.

Additionally, they were looking to address various issues relating to their on-prem servers such as vulnerability, limited scalability, data backup concerns, and disaster recovery issues  

Furthermore, the client was also looking for a cloud solution to handle varying transaction loads efficiently. Lastly, they wanted to explore the advantages of a cloud database service.

Solution

Team SkillNet initiated the design of the Cloud migration solution by conducting a comprehensive review of the on-prem components. They also took into account various issues which included managing different database encryptions, understanding whitelisting requirements, load balancers selection, devising a robust backup strategy, handling index rebuilding, configuration choices, managing support team expectations, creating parallel environments, and addressing Sync and Validation service issues. Subsequently, they developed a well-thought-out cloud transformation strategy, to support the migration program.

The migration followed a reconfiguration strategy, also known as “move, refine, and transfer,” for the existing POS solution components. This approach involved targeted enhancements in the cloud without altering the core architecture of the application.

The hosting for the database and application servers mirrored the on-premises setup. Load balancers were used to ensure seamless connections to the application servers. The migration encompassed the retail suite of applications and underwent comprehensive testing across pre-production and production stages, covering transition, reversions, high availability, disaster recovery, and DNS Switch Solutions.

Data migration was accomplished using specialized tools for real-time data syncing. The database instances were managed through a managed service, and measures for disaster recovery included regular snapshots and backups.

The health of the servers was monitored through alert configurations, and a Central DNS Switch was implemented for a smooth transition without downtime. DNS configuration was managed using an appropriate service, with automated failover mechanisms in place to ensure uninterrupted service during the migration process.

Results – Increased agility, innovation, and resilience with cloud transformation

The client reaped significant benefits from their cloud transformation strategy and successful migration.  

1. Seamless cutover with zero downtime
2. Implementation of a high-availability, easily scalable platform solution, ensuring continuous operation to meet growing business demands
3. Leveraging managed DB instances for reduced maintenance efforts
4. Assured infrastructure backups to safeguard data integrity
5. Effective monitoring and alerting using cloud provider services and third-party tools
6. A robust Disaster Recovery solution in place for enhanced resilience and preparedness

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