How we participated in the opening of the world's largest store of children's toys

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 largest retail chains and stores.

Opening of the Central Children's Store

Many of you have probably heard that recently the largest children's shopping center in the world has opened in Moscow on Lubyanka. It took seven years, as again, already in a transformed form, the former "Children's World" met its visitors.
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On the same day, the new opened toy store “World of Hamleys” from Ideas4retail group of companies, which played an important role in the concept of refining the British brand, received its first guests at Lubyanka. The head of the board of directors of the Ideas4retail group of companies, Yevgeny Butman, shared: “The world of Hamleys” turned out exactly the way it was conceived: a modern, theatrical, entertaining and engaging store that has no analogues . ”
"World of Hamleys" on Lubyanka is one of the largest toy stores in Russia, located on a vast territory of two floors, with a total area of ​​6,750 square meters. m

Solving cloud problems

To complete the work of the Hamleys store, even before its opening, it became necessary to organize an IT infrastructure with secure Internet access. Mandatory access to the outside world is due to the fact that all Hamleys outlets use cloud services to which they need to connect.

However, despite the fact that we are a cloud integrator, we have to solve not only “cloud” problems. Dedicated specialists of our company work on the client’s sites. In this particular case, we designed the store's network landscape by installing and configuring Cisco Catalyst, Juniper, APC Symmetra equipment in accordance with it. Including the project organized a fault-tolerant network infrastructure to connect to services that are located in the cloud of our company.

What services does a large retailer bring to the cloud?

The geography of the activities of the Ideas4retail group of companies is quite extensive. Stores of recognizable brands 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 quality and operational support to ensure the reliability and resiliency of the IaaS site.



Thanks to the existing virtualization and cloud solutions, a large retailer can absolutely easily afford to transfer any services to the cloud. An example of this is the Hamleys fully virtualized infrastructure. It includes all the tools necessary for running a business, the most significant of them are presented below.

Virtualized Domain Infrastructure

A virtualized domain infrastructure, represented by several domain controllers in the IT-GRAD cloud, is deployed for the company's central office. Using domain authentication, users can access the necessary resources and applications. As for the points of sale, each of them has workstations that are combined into the appropriate "working groups".

Certification Authorities

Certification certificate authorities are responsible for the process of issuing and validating certificates used for different tasks of trading platforms.

Mail Services

Microsoft Exchange is used as a mail service rendered to the cloud, which simultaneously performs the function of a Client Access Server (CAS) and a Transport Hub (HT).

Virus and spam protection

Spam Titan Server acts as a border server that protects against spam and malicious software. Hamleys IT specialists have access to the administration console, which allows you to manage filtering settings and rules without contacting IT-GRAD technical support.

Communications system

The cloud infrastructure of the Hamleys store network contains unified communications systems based on Cisco Unified Communications, presented in the form of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX) software. These solutions allow Hamleys employees to use a unified communications system that works smoothly, regardless of physical location.

Border Protection

The Microsoft Forefront TMG Edge Gateway protects the infrastructure of the organization and is used as a reverse proxy for accessing Microsoft Exchange.

Connecting outlets to the cloud

And a few more words about how the “bundle” of remote outlets of the Hamleys chain of shops with the IT-GRAD cloud is taking place. Let's start with the fact that in every store there is a Cisco ASA iron with a dedicated external static IP address, and Juniper equipment is installed on the IT TOWN side. Each device is connected to the provider through the appropriate interfaces, an IPSec tunnel is established between remote points and traffic is allowed in both directions. As for VPN, it is nothing but 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 into a local network using switches and is connected to the Cisco ASA. Internet access from each outlet is also provided via VPN, that is, virtually all traffic passes through the Palo Alto firewall in the IT-GRAD cloud, which allows monitoring application traffic, controlling users' actions and the transmitted content.



Through a VPN channel, Hamleys IT staff can remotely deploy and manage the required services.

Outsourcing first line support

Outsourcing first-line support is the ability to quickly and cost-effectively organize around-the-clock user support within the company. The group of companies Ideas4retail went down this path and transferred its first support line to outsourcing. Schematically, everything is simple: if the outlet has any problem, the store employee calls the allocated number, getting into the IT-GRAD support service. All requests from Hamleys users are registered and processed by IT-GRAD specialists in the client's ITSM-system, Hamleys, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.

The first line of IT GRAD support redistributes the registered tickets, escalating them to the second Ideas4retail line to the respective 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 staff.

Cloud telephony for chain stores

How does telephony work? On the client side, a unified communications system has been introduced, and more precisely, Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) has been integrated with Microsoft Lync, which allows making and managing calls from Cisco IP phones installed in stores. Through the cuci-lync console, the call is transferred and put on hold, and also switched from the hardware device to the 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 lies in the flexibility and ease 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 specialized software suite from Cisco. Not without the use of Cisco Contact Center Express (CCX), which with the help of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) handles the processing and distribution of incoming calls.

Finally

Answering the question about what services a large retailer can put in the cloud, we can confidently say that everything. The example of the Hamleys chain of stores confirms that the complete transfer of the entire IT infrastructure to the cloud is justified by years of uninterrupted operation (the IT infrastructure of the Hamleys chain of stores in Russia has been located in the ITa-GRAD IaaS provider cloud for over four years). On the other hand, we see that the marketing term “cloud” hides not so much infrastructure rental (IaaS) and applications (SaaS), but complex outsourcing of tasks to ensure a reliable IT landscape, which includes not only cloud-based tasks.