April 30, 2015 at 12:23How we participated in the opening of the world's largest children's toy store
Today, retail as an industry is the main consumer of cloud solutions in the IaaS model. And this trend affects not only small, medium, large, but also the BIGGEST retail chains and stores.
Opening of the Central Children's Store
Many of you have probably heard that most recently in Moscow on Lubyanka the largest children's shopping complex in the world has opened. As many as seven years have passed, when again, already in a transformed form, the former Detsky Mir met its visitors.
On the same day, the first opened toy store “World of Hamleys” of the Ideas4retail group of companies, which played an important role in the concept of finalizing the British brand, received the first guests at Lubyanka. The head of the board of directors of the Ideas4retail group of companies, Yevgeny Butman, shared: “ The Hamleys world” turned out exactly the way it was conceived: a modern, theatrical, entertaining and enthralling store that has no analogues . ”
“Hamleys World” in Lubyanka is one of the largest toy stores in Russia, located on a vast territory of two floors, with a total area of 6750 square meters. m
Solving non-cloud tasks
For the full operation of the Hamleys store, even before its opening, it became necessary to organize an IT infrastructure with a safe Internet connection. Mandatory access to the outside world is due to the fact that all Hamleys outlets use cloud services that need to be connected.
However, despite the fact that we are a cloud integrator, we have to solve not only the "cloud" problems. Dedicated specialists of our company work on client sites. In this particular case, we designed the network landscape of the store by installing and configuring Cisco Catalyst, Juniper, APC Symmetra equipment in accordance with it. In particular, the project organized a fault-tolerant network infrastructure for connecting to services located in the cloud of our company.
What services does a large retailer bring to the cloud?
The geography of the Ideas4retail group of companies is very extensive. Recognized brand stores are located in various cities of Russia, with a total of about 80 outlets. Each store is a remote site connected to a highly reliable virtual infrastructure, where the client, for obvious reasons, requires the provision of high-quality and operational support while ensuring the reliability and fault tolerance of the IaaS platform.
Thanks to the available capabilities of virtualization and cloud solutions, a large retailer can quite easily afford to transfer absolutely any services to the cloud. An example of this is the fully virtualized Hamleys infrastructure. It includes all the tools necessary for doing business, below are the most significant of them.
Virtualized Domain Infrastructure
A virtualized domain infrastructure has been deployed for the company's central office, represented by several domain controllers in the IT-GRAD cloud. Using domain authentication, users can access the necessary resources and applications. As for the points of sale, in each of them there are workstations that are combined into the corresponding "workgroups".
Certification Authorities
Certification certification authorities are responsible for the process of issuing and validating certificates used for various tasks of trading floors.
Mail services
As an email service delivered to the cloud, Microsoft Exchange is used, which simultaneously functions as a client access server (CAS) and a transport hub (HT).
Virus and Spam Protection
The Spam Titan server acts as an edge server that protects against spam and malware. Hamleys IT specialists have access to the administration console, which allows you to manage filtering settings and rules without contacting IT-GRAD technical support.
Communication system
In the cloud infrastructure of the Hamleys chain of stores, there are unified communications systems based on Cisco Unified Communications, presented in the form of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX) software. These solutions enable Hamleys employees to use a single communications system that works seamlessly regardless of their physical location.
Border protection
The Microsoft Forefront TMG Border Gateway protects your organization’s infrastructure and is used as a reverse proxy to access Microsoft Exchange.
Connecting outlets to the cloud
And a few more words about how the “bundle” of remote retail outlets of the Hamleys chain of stores with the IT Grad cloud occurs. To begin with, in every store there is an iron Cisco ASA with a dedicated external static IP address, and Juniper equipment is installed on the IT-GRAD side. Each device is connected to the provider through the corresponding interfaces, an IPSec tunnel is organized between the remote points and traffic is allowed in both directions. As for the VPN, this is nothing more than a Site-to-Site IPSec with a given preschared key value. Details about the various options for connecting to the cloud, we wrote in the article " Connecting to the corporate cloud ."
Almost every store has computers, cash desks, and Cisco BP phones. All this is organized in a local area network by means of switches and is connected to Cisco ASA. Internet access from each outlet is also through a VPN, that is, virtually all traffic passes through the Palo Alto firewall in the IT Grad cloud, which allows you to monitor application traffic, control user actions and transmitted content.
Through a VPN channel, Hamleys store chain IT specialists can remotely deploy and manage the required services.
First line outsourcing
Outsourcing of the first line of support is an opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively organize round-the-clock user support within the company. The Ideas4retail group of companies went along this path and outsourced its first support line. Schematically, everything is simple: if a point of sale has a problem, a store employee calls a dedicated number, getting into the IT-GRAD support service. All Hamleys user requests are registered and processed by IT-GRAD specialists in the ITSM client system, Hamleys chain of stores, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.
The first IT-GRAD support line redistributes the registered tickets, escalating them to the second Ideas4retail line to the appropriate groups of specialists according to the areas of responsibility. If the task is solved on the first line, the ticket is successfully closed by IT-GRAD employees.
Cloud telephony for chain stores
How does telephony work? A unified communications system has been implemented on the client side, and more precisely, the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) has been integrated with Microsoft Lync, which allows you to make and manage calls from Cisco IP phones installed in stores. Using the cuci-lync console, a call is transferred and put on hold, as well as switching from a hardware device to a software client and vice versa. With Cisco UCM, you can perform call switching and manage connections in a variety of environments, providing support for a virtual desktop. The advantage of this approach is the flexibility and simplicity of connecting any new store to an established communications system, regardless of location.
To make it work, we installed a Lync server, Cisco UCM with LDAP synchronization and authentication enabled, a Microsoft Lync client and a set of specialized software from Cisco. Not without the use of Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX), which using IVR (Interactive Voice Response) performs the processing and distribution of incoming calls.
Finally
Answering the question about what services a large retailer can take to the cloud, we can confidently say that that's all. An example of a Hamleys chain of stores confirms that the full transfer of the entire IT infrastructure to the cloud is justified for years of uninterrupted operation (the IT infrastructure of the Hamleys chain of stores in Russia has been located in the cloud of the IT-GRAD IaaS provider for more than four years ). On the other hand, we see that the marketing term “cloud” hides not so much rental infrastructure (IaaS) and applications (SaaS), but rather complex outsourcing of tasks to provide a reliable IT landscape, which includes not only “cloud” tasks.
