Retail Immersed in the Cloud

Customer Challenge

When a global automotive parts retailer began looking into cloud platforms to accelerate their plans for digital transformation, they chose Microsoft Azure. They quickly realized they needed cloud transformation expertise to guide their plans with architectural leadership and governance. At the time, the company was grappling with a variety of internal challenges that made it difficult to integrate Microsoft Azure at scale. After going through an Azure Cloud Foundation (ACF) engagement with ACTS, they tried to implement the technology on their own and found themselves on rough terrain with knowledge gaps and limited internal traction.  The client was facing process inefficiencies, a shortage of employees with deep cloud skills and insufficient experience with large-scale cloud migrations ─ that’s where ACTS stepped back in.

Solution & Business Outcome

To overcome their cloud transformation barriers, the retailer requested ACTS to expedite their Azure core implementation through our Cloud Immersion Program (CIP) and a dedicated team of cloud experts. With CIP, our client was able to align their long-term goals to create a clear vision for cloud adoption, ensuring their cloud transformation was well structured, documented and aligned with both key business outcomes and technical requirements.

Over the next 18 months the ACTS team worked collectively with the client to uncover new technologies and implement proof of concepts aligned to solve key business challenges. This resulted in an optimized cloud strategy, modernized security policies, IT Service Management (ITSM) governance processes, and a clear back up and disaster recovery plan.

The move to Azure has made life easier for the IT team, taking the process for spinning up new environments from weeks to days and making strides towards the ultimate future state of canned responses. The ACTS team defined what the environment should look like and created scripts to automate the deployment with a repeatable consistent process to support the client’s global presence.

Ensuring visibility to security for all cloud workloads and enabling log analytics on every virtual machine with provided the ability to troubleshoot, spot anomalies and investigate security issues —relieving a lot of pressure on their security teams.

Ultimately, ACTS deployed Azure core infrastructure to support the client’s global business — six Azure regions and cores. This strategy for shared services provided an excellent example for the world wide team to follow, offering the ability to implement the exact same IT model in each region, meaning applications deployed in the US have the same experience and model as in every other region throughout the world with local regulatory and compliance issues integrated.

This rollout has allowed our client to maximize the full cloud environment of Azure and puts them well on their way towards accelerating their plans for digital transformation.