Sainsbury’s – Streamlining and Securing Online Sales
Sainsbury’s – Streamlining and Securing Online Sales
Sainsbury's is the second largest supermarket retailer in the United Kingdom. They projected substantial growth in online sales and needed a very secure, reliable, scalable solution to handle all the growing e-commerce operations.
Executive Summary
Sainsbury's offers food, clothing, home goods, and financial services to customers in the U.K. Like many companies, it projected substantial growth in online sales as a percentage of its overall business and therefore needed a secure and scalable cloud solution to support this e-commerce growth.
Goals
To handle its growing e-commerce operations, Sainsbury’s required a reliable solution to authenticate users of its loyalty programs across all of their online transactions. Also, Sainsbury’s data center infrastructure needed to be upgraded to offer seamless portability and networking, as well as to provide the necessary security to ensure data integrity, all while being supported by proactive management and service.
Solution Delivered
The infrastructure solution designed by vCloud® Air™ powered by OVHcloud provided a significant data center extension to house the Identity project within our London data center. Speed of deployment was the initial driver to move to the cloud and the need for the design to mirror the on-premise deployment was key. The networking and cloud deployment is a standardized Sainsbury's design, so supporting the environment required no additional training for Sainsbury’s IT staff.
Dual MPLS circuits give a resilient extension to Sainsbury's data center network into both pre-production and production cloud environments within vCloud Air. The cloud environments are a traditional three-tier deployment with in-depth defense provided by virtual F5 and Check Point devices. These virtual appliances are layered between the web, application, and database tiers to reflect Sainsbury’s data center best practices.
This configuration is replicated in the vCloud Air Frankfurt data center in an active/active configuration. There has been 100 percent VM availability over 24 months within this hyper-resilient configuration. A number of direct VPN connections are available as a third level of resilience to the connectivity.
A further cross-connection from the vCloud Air environment to the Cloud Exchange service in Equinix is also in place giving Sainsbury an aggregation point to a multi-cloud universe. Applications that use other public clouds traverse this connection and work seamlessly with workloads within vCloud Air. Palo Alto Networks' VM-Series are utilized to protect the virtualized environment against advanced cyber threats, harmonizing the security protection with the on-premise workloads.
Future Plans
As part of its cloud-first strategy, Sainsbury's is now evaluating a data center consolidation plan, which will incorporate disaster recovery. With vCloud Air, Sainsbury’s can use Hybrid Cloud Manager and Hybrid DR to live migrate workloads from Sainsbury's data centers into vCloud Air in London and have those workloads replicated out to the Frankfurt data center.