Company summary
Kirkland’s Inc., founded in 1966, is a specialty retailer of home décor in the United States. Currently, it operates 434 stores in 37 states as well as an ecommerce website, which offers over 12,000 products. The company’s stores present a broad selection of home décor merchandise that produced over $600 million in net sales.
Kirkland’s is growing by expanding collections that address more of its shoppers’ needs and expanding marketing channels to reach more of its core customer base as well as pulling in Millennial shoppers. Its solid, omni-channel platform addresses the large, dynamic market for home décor retailing.
The Challenge
Seeking an immediate migration to the AWS cloud before Oracle platform shuts down
Kirkland’s had been hosting its Oracle Commerce Platform on a single legacy datacenter that Oracle had just announced would be shutting down. With a tight deadline of just four months and lack of comprehensive documentation for a migration from the Oracle datacenter, Kirkland’s needed an experienced Amazon Web Services partner to ensure a smooth and thorough transition to the AWS cloud.
Kirkland’s needed a migration to the AWS cloud, as it was also seeking increased availability and scalability, especially during holidays, when its legacy on-premises server would often get overloaded.
In addition to a basic services migration, Kirkland’s was seeking a partner who could implement additional security controls such as Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance to protect the data in its ecommerce environment as well as support its continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) code pipeline. It also needed tight integrations with its third-party security and monitoring technology providers, including Trend Micro, Datadog, and Alert Logic, as well as with its own datacenter and retail infrastructure, including SQL and Java.
The Solution
Gaining high availability with AWS Availability Zones
Kirkland’s turned to CloudHesive, who conducted an initial assessment of the environment and a well architected review to ensure the new landing zone and security controls were in place. CloudHesive developed a plan to migrate development, quality assurance, staging, and production environments to AWS, adding fallback provisions in the event of challenges with the transition.
To ensure reliability and high availability, CloudHesive designed and migrated services to multiple Availability Zones (AZ), isolated locations within AWS Regions that contain one or more data centers to ensure scalability and reliability and prevent outages in the event of a failure within a single Region. CloudHesive deployed the AZs to host the retailer’s Microsoft SQL-based databases as well as AWS Virtual Private Cloud and services for storage, computing, DevOps and site monitoring, and security. It also hosts integrations to its third-party security and monitoring controls, including Trend Micro, Datadog, and Alert Logic.
The new solution uses Alert Logic and other tools to perform external vulnerability scans required for PCI compliance and addresses findings quarterly to maintain PCI standards, as well as the high availability and scalability of the AWS cloud.
The benefits
Gaining security and cost-efficient scalability in the AWS cloud with CloudHesive managed services
CloudHesive completed the digital transformation from the legacy Oracle infrastructure to scalable, reliable AWS Availability Zones in under 90 days with no rollbacks. Following the migration, CloudHesive continues to provide managed security services and monitoring services to ensure end-to-end management of the system.
This has enabled Kirkland’s internal organization to remain lean, while CloudHesive manages the platform on a day-to-day basis, including proactive scaling to accommodate sales events and holiday spikes, reporting throughout sales events, and reactive event support. CloudHesive ensures full system availability at the lowest cost, even during peak traffic periods, and provides support for retail fraud, such as stolen gift cards.
Services that drive success
Managed security services
- Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) as a Service
- Third-party assessment and audit support
- Cloud detection and response
- Endpoint security as a service
- Vulnerability management service for PCI DSS
Managed services
- Managed patching, backups, and oversight
- Governance of the production environment
Devops
- Deployment of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
- Deployment of Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS for storage
- Deployment of Amazon EC2 for computing
- Deployment of AWS WAF for security
- Deployment of Amazon CloudWatch for DevOps and site monitoring
- Provisioning of services AWS CloudFormation templates
- Built deployment scripts for environment deployment
- Integrated Trend Micro for cloud security and performance and system analytics
- Integrated Datadog for system monitoring
- Integrated Alert Logic for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
Customer benefit summary
- Seamless migration to AWS cloud in under 90 days
- Cost-efficient scalability for sales events and peak traffic periods
- Retail fraud support
AWS Technologies used
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Amazon S3
- AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF)
- AWS CloudFormation
- Application Load Balancer
- Amazon CloudWatch
CloudHesive technologies used
n/a
Third-party technologies used
- Trend Micro
- Datadog
- Alert Logic
Industry
Retail, Consumer Goods
Segment
Private
Region
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