GoodEarth Embraces Digital Success Through Microsoft Navision ERP Migration to AWS
Good Earth India is a design house which celebrates the heritage of Asia. The company offers apparels, lifestyle, design and wellness accessories that brings to life sustainable luxury—pure designs with an emphasis on hand crafted things.
Guided by lofty ideals of aesthetics—rich in culture and beauty—the business is built on a foundation of customer experience. Its distinct positioning targets discerning consumers with eclectic taste, leveraging an omnichannel strategy to create experiences.
Good Earth positions its business itself as immersive experiences where products beckon customers by sheer force of stories they tell
Good Earth
www.goodearth.in
01. The Growing Need for IT Systems in Ecommerce
Ecommerce has transformed the landscape of buying and selling. In fact, over the last decade, the Indian retail industry has transformed itself to become one of the fastest growing markets globally.
However, maintaining a large-scale ecommerce store can be a daunting task for retailers – right from managing inventory, to payment process, customer information, and providing good customer service.
GoodEarth, India’s leading luxury online and offline retail brand, was facing similar issues. Starting with just one store in Mumbai in 1996, the brand has grown to become an existing international image, with thriving stores in Turkey, a presence in China and a website that caters to more than 90 countries, while bridging the gap between craft and luxury. Hence, for an ecommerce business like GoodEarth, that continuously expands to add more customers and stores across geographies, an ERP system that can handle a growing workload and complexities, becomes a necessity.
The company realized this when, while celebrating their biggest digital sale, their servers crashed because they were not able to take the load of the website. The existing tech servers needed 72 hours to make the website available again. This meant a huge downtime and loss of precious business opportunities. But we promised to get the website migrated to AWS and back live in less than 24 hours, and they delivered!
Dinesh Joshi, Head of Technology at GoodEarth, said, “That’s when we knew that GoodEarth had to move from a traditional, hosting data centre based IT setup to public cloud which could help us scale technology in a sustainable manner and make it more agile.”
02. The Goals and Challenges
GoodEarth’s crucial enterprise resource planning system (ERP), Microsoft Navision, was the only application that was not running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It ran on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which according to the company was a flexible and reliable cloud infrastructure to efficiently deploy their ERP.
However, GoodEarth was facing many challenges in the existing architecture, the key ones being Security, Uptime, Manageability and Business Continuity. As one of the fastest growing online retailers in the country, scalability was a major concern for GoodEarth. Moreover, any change request in existing infrastructure would take time. There were also frequent downtimes, and GoodEarth was unable to identify the root causes. Hence, they wanted to migrate to a system that would offer advance detective and preventive monitoring features.
GoodEarth reached out to Noventiq, who helped them analyze the situation and assess the problem. The task before us was to help GoodEarth seamlessly migrate Microsoft Navision ERP based on Windows Platform and Microsoft SQL Database, from another public cloud provider to AWS Cloud.
We had to conduct the migration seamlessly with near zero downtime, which would allow for the addition of more features in future to the architecture related to high availability, disaster recovery and improved performance. Additionally, GoodEarth wanted to ensure that any alternative cloud platform was simple to manage and scale, considering the scale of growth that the company is aiming for in the coming years.
Noventiq & AWS To The Rescue
GoodEarth had earlier enlisted us to successfully migrate their website to AWS, so the decision to choose them for this task was well informed. As a reliable AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Noventiq helped design and execute this crucial migration. The AWS cloud infrastructure helped GoodEarth operate more securely, and save substantial costs, all the while benefiting from the scale and performance of the cloud.
04.The Execution
Our team worked to manage the migration and ensure that the entire project was delivered on time and on budget.
We deployed AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Security Group, NACL, which provided a platform to secure the AWS Environment using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for its application, database and supporting servers. CloudFormation templates were used for the provisioning of VPC, EC2 and other supporting services like Cloudtrail, Config and IAM Roles. The entire design was based on multiple Availability Zones (AZ) architecture for high availability and redundancy of application and database systems.
To keep the application and RDP server in private subnets, our team used AWS NLB, thus solving the problem of security in applications. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) was used to store backups of AMI/Snapshots and Native DB backups, while Amazon CloudWatch was deployed to proactively monitor its EC2 instances through the AWS Management Console and alerting capability. We used custom monitoring alerts for OS level metrics, and Zoho Application Monitoring for Web Server IIS and application-specific alerts.
Moreover, by using CloudEndure, Noventiq was able to replicate database in different availability zones, all in real time. This helped maintain business continuity for disaster recovery and continuous backup and minimized RTO / RPO in the event of any disaster.
05. Success Story
We migrated Dynamics NAV to AWS smoothly, without any disruption to GoodEarth’s business, and now monitors and manages the entire environment.
The migration helped improve customer satisfaction levels, while also streamlining and speeding up business processes of GoodEarth. In addition, optimized planning reduced costs, helped operating efficiencies, and provided the scalability to support growth at GoodEarth for years to come.
Complimenting our efforts, Dinesh Joshi said, “After the migration, there was a feeling of positivity of technology in business. We started focusing more on business development and enhancement. Technology wasn’t just a support vertical, but acted as a business enhancer. Today, from two servers of AWS cloud, we now have more than 15 servers running, thanks to Noventiq. This also helps us save 15% per month on tech costs. We are extremely happy with their services, and their work has exceeded our expectations. We have more projects ready to go with Noventiq and AWS in Business Intelligence, Big Data Initiatives and Machine Learning, and we are looking forward to work with them again.”
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