The company behind retail brands such as Harveys and Bensons for Beds has moved its entire critical IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Steinhoff UK Retail is using IT managed services provider, Adapt, to deliver continuous services to its portfolio of 550 retail outlets and 11 warehouses, as well as to its call centre and two head offices.
Adapt said its scalable web hosting service can support seasonal high demand on Harveys’ online furniture store and provides a virtual infrastructure for the testing of a key business application for Bensons.
Steinhoff said it turned to the firm as it tried to make its supply chain flexible enough to keep up with sudden changes, while keeping costs low.
Adapt first migrated the IT systems for Harveys and Bensons for Beds into the hosted environment, which provides a dual site solution for both staging and disaster recovery.
Adapt and Steinhoff are also working together to build an infrastructure and network that will support further expected surges in trading for both Harveys and Bensons.
Mark Spicer, head of IT at Harveys, said: "It was critical to get this system up and running as soon as possible without any downtime as this would be our first undertaking under the new agreement.
"Adapt has certainly delivered on this, offering a creative solution with the extreme flexibility required to cope with sudden expected and unexpected peaks in demand."
"This is a perfect example of the continuous competitive edge that a private cloud environment can offer businesses in the fast-paced, dynamic retail industry – not just at busy periods such as Christmas," said Simon Fisk, sales and marketing director at Adapt.
