How we helped a global retailer exit a data center in five months

Case Study
McKinsey designed a tailored migration strategy for a global retailer operating in more than 20 countries and successfully led their application migration to Google Cloud.

 

On this page: Challenge | Solution | Result

The challenge

The client urgently needed to upgrade its outdated on-premises data center. Aging hardware in the data center had failed, and 30+ apps were not performing optimally. The client recognized that it did not have adequate disaster recovery capabilities, potentially jeopardizing sales efforts. The client planned to close the data center and migrate all applications to Google Cloud within nine months.

Helped a global retailer exit a data center in five months
Helped a global retailer exit a data center in five months

The Solution

McKinsey helped the client migrate all applications to Google Cloud and implemented a disaster recovery strategy. McKinsey provided program management support for AS400 migration and testing to Azure/Skytap hosting while helping with hypercare and decommissioning the data center. McKinsey implemented Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), Compute Engine, Google Cloud Foundation with a robust security layer (Security Command Center Premium), and networking infrastructure.

The Result

McKinsey successfully planned, designed, and executed the migration of over 30 applications to Google Cloud for the client, completing the project in under six months. The client was able to decommission their data center and move to a more scalable hosting environment on GCP, mitigating the impact of infrastructure downtime on sales operations.

McKinsey improved the client’s ability to dynamically scale the infrastructure to meet seasonal demands by establishing warm and cold standby disaster recovery capabilities to match the criticality of applications