Cloud Infrastructure Migration

The Challenge

A national retailer was struggling with aging on-premise infrastructure that couldn't scale for peak demand periods. During critical sales events like Black Friday and end-of-year sales, the systems frequently experienced performance degradation and outages, directly impacting revenue and customer trust.

The legacy infrastructure required significant capital investment to upgrade, with long lead times for capacity increases. The organisation needed a more agile approach that could respond to demand fluctuations while reducing overall infrastructure costs.

Our Approach

ISG was engaged to architect and execute a cloud migration strategy that would address scalability challenges while minimising risk to business operations. Our approach included:

• Infrastructure Assessment: Conducted a comprehensive assessment of existing infrastructure, applications, and dependencies to inform the migration strategy.
• Migration Planning: Developed a phased migration plan that prioritised workloads based on business impact and technical complexity.
• Risk Mitigation: Designed rollback procedures and parallel running strategies to ensure zero-downtime migration.

The Solution

We architected and executed a phased cloud migration strategy with zero-downtime cutover and automated scaling capabilities:

• Hybrid cloud architecture enabling gradual migration
• Auto-scaling infrastructure responding to demand in real-time
• Containerised applications for consistent deployment
• Infrastructure-as-code for repeatable, auditable configurations
• Enhanced monitoring and alerting for proactive issue resolution

The Results

The cloud migration delivered significant improvements across reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency:

• 99.9% uptime achieved with no service disruptions during peak sales events
• 40% reduction in infrastructure costs through optimised resource utilisation
• 5x scalability improvement with ability to scale capacity in minutes rather than months
• Zero downtime during the migration process