Large food retailer

SECTOR
……………………………………………………………………
Retail

CHALLENGE
……………………………………………………………………
To build an Azure platform, connected consumable from day one, with appropriate levels of security, compliance and governance in as short a timeframe as possible.

SOLUTION
……………………………………………………………………
Velocity Landing Zone

BENEFITS
……………………………………………………………………
> Azure platform designed, deployed and configured within 1 month.
> Limited involvement from its own IT and development teams.
> Scaleable solution with the autonomy to build more product family spokes as and when required.
> Aligned to NCSC14 security principles.

Large Supermarket Chain Accelerates

Cloud Journey with Velocity Landing Zone

Sol-Tec’s Azure capabilities are first class and their commitment to the platform is without question. It’s why they’re trusted across Microsoft’s UK business to engage with prospects and customers. With its Velocity Landing Zone IP, they have overcome a common fear that many organisations have about cloud migration being time consuming, complicated and costly.

Blair Galloway, Principle Solution Specialist

Microsoft

The Challenge

A leading supermarket chain with an already large presence in AWS, was looking to build an Azure offering to provide product families with the ability to consume cloud from Microsoft Azure as well as AWS.

In a bid to ensure that cloud products were aligned with good practice, consumable and advocated across the product families, a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCOE) team was set up to address how products should be deployed in the cloud across the organisation. With the benefit of hindsight gleaned from its AWS experiences, it understood the importance of security, compliance and governance as foundations to an effective cloud strategy but, with so many elements to consider, its challenge was executing this effectively in a suitable timeframe.

Driven by an immediate goal to connect its on-premise data centre to Azure with ExpressRoute and begin migrating workloads from its data centres into the cloud, it approached Microsoft who facilitated an introduction with its trusted cloud partner Sol-Tec.

The Solution

Sol-Tec impressed the retailer with both its expertise and its Velocity Landing Zone service which proved to be the perfect tool for the job. A blend of consultancy and reuseable, predefined IaaC artefacts, Velocity Landing Zone enables Sol-Tec to deploy and configure a secure and compliant baseline Azure environment in an accelerated timeframe. Refined through a deployment and feedback loop across numerous customers, Sol-Tec’s proposal appealed to the wholesale food retailer for a number of reasons:

With the CCOE under pressure to build an Azure platform, connected consumable from day one, Velocity Landing Zone’s capacity to deliver its customer specific configuration in an accelerated timeframe made it a compelling solution for the retailer.
The ability to deploy to Azure with minimal involvement from its own IT and development teams was ideal as the customer’s own workforce was skilled in AWS but not Azure.
Product families would be able to deploy cloud resources independently of IT using DevOps pipelines, whilst still adhering to controls and governance established within central IT, thus ensuring appropriate governance while also preventing sprawl. This perfectly addressed one of the CCOE teams’ primary goals.
The ‘hub and spoke’ topology of the solution would enable product families as well as third party vendors to focus on just their applications, knowing they are consuming Azure in a secure and managed environment.
While not a government organisation, the fact that Velocity Landing Zone is aligned to NCSC14 security principles was a big draw to the retailer, providing peace of mind that the solution would deliver appropriate levels of security and compliance.
Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) from the customer’s chosen vendor were deployed in the hub subscriptions with Virtual Networks (VNets) used to segregate Red Zone (untrusted) and Green Zone (trusted) network traffic.
The solution is designed to scale as new services are built or moved to Azure. Sol-Tec provided the customer with 10 pre-built product family “spokes” along with the pipeline to allow them to create more spokes on demand.

To establish the food retailer’s requirements, Sol-Tec’s consulting and build teams began with an information gathering exercise which included a gap analysis for “standard” Azure Landing Zone components, as well as seeking to understand team usage and access alongside specific technology and vendor ties and preferences.

In the end, it took Sol-Tec just under a month, from this initial consultation phase to product handover, to design and build an appropriately secure and governed platform for this customer. Without Velocity Landing Zone, the same project would have taken more than 6 months to deliver.

Follow-up, knowledge sharing sessions with a Sol-Tec consultant, ensured that the supermarket chain could capably manage its new environment (e.g creating additional spokes) without reliance on a partner. This alongside its Velocity Support contract strikes a perfect balance between autonomy and access to expertise when required.

Next Steps

This leading supermarket chain is now working with Sol-Tec to migrate its on-premise services into Azure. It is also taking the opportunity to migrate its Windows 2008 servers to Azure, to reap the benefits of an extended product lifecycle.

Blair Galloway, Principle Solution Specialist

Further reading

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