Established in 1948, our client is a major American wholesale company that supports a global network of over 4,500 independent retail outlets. The company is based out of Chicago and specializes in a wide array of products, including home improvement tools and household hardware.
The challenge
A complete IT infrastructure —critical to our client's future success —was exceedingly complex
- Limiting future capital investments and accelerating depreciation of technology and assets
- Managing ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs along with managed services expenses
- Delivering a complex migration across two data centers that included many business and infrastructure applications and servers
- Achieving a cost-effective GCP Landing Zone to support workloads from multiple data centers and regions
The Objective
Modernize and optimize existing IT operations to enable new financial strategy
The client was keen to revamp their IT infrastructure and enhance their financial strategy by modernizing and optimizing their existing IT operations, including the full remediation of legacy operating systems and apps in the target state. To start, they partnered with HCLTech for consultation on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and to devise a data center exit strategy.
The Solution
GCP native services serve as the foundation of new technology infrastructure and Leveraging our wealth of experience and advanced toolset, HCLTech delivered an end-to-end solution — ranging from assessment to delivery — comprised of GCP, Strata zone, CMDB reports and meticulous migration and cutover plans. Technologies implemented:
- GCP native services
- Robust network security measures using Interconnect, SD-Wan Solution Meraki and Cisco Catalyst, GCP Firewall, Palo Alto, and Tenable
- Storage and backup systems made use of M4CE and Rsync\Robocopy as migration tools
- Operations were further optimized through cloud monitoring with Galileo, QROC and SNOW
The Impact
Cost reductions, efficiency improvements and ROI realization
- 50% reduction in manual effort and cost for regression test cycles through the strategic use of automation
- 1,500 servers migrated within an aggressive 4-month timeline
- Minimized business disruption by capitalizing on the existing skillsets of the talent pool
- Delivered 40% of committed benefits and up to 45% of extending benefits with realized year-on-year incident reduction
- Reduced system complexity for increased scalability with improved IT agility and flexibility
- Leveraged existing VMware Stack investments for maximum ROI from systems transformation and significantly enhanced operational efficiency
