The challenge
The organization ran critical applications in data centres that were approaching the limits of their capacity. Peak trading periods strained the infrastructure, raising the risk of slowdowns at the worst possible moments for the business.
Provisioning new capacity was slow and expensive, which constrained the ability to test ideas or respond to seasonal demand. Operations teams spent significant effort maintaining hardware rather than improving services.
Leadership wanted to modernize the infrastructure to gain elasticity and resilience while keeping the migration low risk for the systems that run the stores and the online channel.
Technology landscape
On premises data centres hosting a mix of commercial and bespoke applications, some with tight interdependencies.
Manual provisioning and patching processes that made capacity changes slow and consumed operational time.
Store, ecommerce and supply chain systems with seasonal demand peaks that stressed fixed capacity.
Our approach
We assessed the application estate and grouped workloads by complexity and business criticality, then chose an appropriate migration path for each rather than forcing a single pattern across all of them.
We prioritized workloads that would benefit most from elasticity and designed landing zones with security, networking and governance established before any migration began.
We sequenced moves to limit risk during peak trading windows, scheduling the most sensitive systems for quieter periods with clear rollback plans.
Implementation
We built the cloud foundation with guardrails for identity, networking and cost governance, then migrated workloads in waves using rehosting or targeted re-platforming as suited each application.
Interdependent systems were moved together to avoid performance issues from split components, and we validated each wave with functional and performance testing before directing live traffic.
We put monitoring and automated scaling in place and transferred operational knowledge to internal teams, so they could run the new environment confidently after each migration.
Outcomes
- Core systems handled peak trading more comfortably, as elastic capacity absorbed seasonal demand that had previously strained fixed infrastructure.
- Operations teams spent less time on hardware maintenance and provisioning, freeing effort for improvements that benefit the business.
- Improved resilience and clearer monitoring gave the business more confidence in availability during its most important trading periods.
- The ability to provision environments quickly made it easier to test and adopt new capabilities without long lead times.