Overview

Retail chain, with 150 stores, was experiencing significant constraints from its existing on-site infrastructure. Although the current system allowed for daily operations, it was unable to cope with the high levels of demand, especially during seasonal sales such as Black Friday. This resulted in outages, thus affecting income and customers’ confidence.

Approach

The infrastructure set up by the organization was not built to cope with unexpected traffic spikes. This caused outages, leading to downtime and transaction failures during peak shopping times. This outage costed the organization a lot when it happened on Black Friday, since just one hour of downtime was costing the organization approximately ₹5 crore.

• Recurring outages during peak sales times
• ₹5 crore/hour revenue loss during downtime
• Infrastructure unable to cope with traffic spikes

Another challenge faced by the organization was scaling the infrastructure. Scaling would take up too much time and resources to be effective, since the process was largely manual. This made it impossible to adapt to changes in customer demand quickly.

Operational costs were also rising due to maintenance, hardware upgrades, and data center management. Despite the high investment, the system still failed to deliver consistent performance during critical business periods. The company needed a more efficient solution that could reduce costs while improving reliability.

Impact on Business

The switch to Azure provided instant benefits. The retail chain was able to perform its Black Friday event without experiencing any downtime, guaranteeing continuous transactions from their customers through Azure Migration Services. Availability was maximized, and the system automatically scaled to meet the demands, while at the same time lowering infrastructure costs.

• Black Friday event performed without downtime.
• Achieved 99.99% system availability.
• Infrastructure cost reduction by 40%.
• Peak traffic of 10x with no manual scaling