LS Travel Retail North America, a world leader in travel retail running the largest international network of over 3300 duty-free and luxury travel essentials and foods service stores in more than 30 countries, had to replace much of their on-premise infrastructure as they were approaching the end of hardware lifecycles.
The support infrastructure included locations throughout Europe, North America, Asia and the Pacific, and rather than continue to invest in on-premise hardware, the retailer wanted to migrate to a cloud IaaS solution. They required a solution that offered Canadian-located data centers. They wanted the most flexibility for on-demand usage and flexible disaster recovery solutions. They required a provider that could support direct high-speed dedicated WAN links into the cloud data center. They needed a solution that provided them the maximum cost-effective solution.
Buchanan proposed a cloud IaaS solution based on IBM/SoftLayer® that would best fit their need, allowing LS Travel to migrate the organizations’ complete computing infrastructure, which included both production and development virtual machines and physical servers, to the cloud while providing a seamless environment for LS Travel customers and employees.
They now have cloud-based services on demand for their infrastructure, changing their procurement from technology solutions with a very long cycle that demanded capital outlay of purchasing hardware, to a cloud-based solution that can be deployed and implemented in a matter of hours.
By far, the biggest benefit to LS Travel Retail was the increased fluidity of their business. The solution provides their internal IT department the ability to scale dynamically with the needs of the business in short ramp-up times.
They are estimated to save an annual 10% reduction in hardware costs and increase productivity by 25%-30%, simply because IT resources will now be focused on channels of the business that drive revenue, and less on implementation. The completion of the cloud migration provided LS Travel with a platform that would allow them flexible options for disaster recovery solutions.
The IBM-focused solution also offers the deployment of virtual machines, allowing LS Travel a 4-hour RTO (return to operation) in the event of a disaster, but also allows them to spin up and spin down workloads, and only pay for systems when they are online. This provides a colossal factor in controlling monthly costs and consumption for the organization.
Learn more about the specific IT solutions deployed & their outcomes
