CASE STUDY
In 1976 , Michel Leclercq and a small team of sports lovers embarked on an adventure : to bring quality , affordable sports gear and equipment under one roof . Their goal ? To make sports more accessible to everyone . Since its first store in Lille , France , Decathlon has grown into a global leader and innovator in sports gear , launching its first originally designed products in 1986 . Driven by innovation and passion for sports , Decathlon has won over sports enthusiasts around the world . Today , Decathlon has 93,000 employees and over 1,600 stores , in more than 69 countries .
Its products are the result of passion , extensive testing and the relentless pursuit of affordability , while ensuring sustainable practices that protect the environment we love . Decathlon knows sports are better when shared . These are core principles not only applied to its products , but to the data and IT infrastructure that serves as the backbone of the entirety of its business endeavours . of the main cloud providers ( Azure , AWS , GCP , Alibaba Cloud , Yandex and others ). One of the final steps would be one of its most critical on its trek towards a successful Digital Transformation – the migration of all its on-premises unstructured archive data , ranging from product and inventory to customer data .
“ We knew a migration of this magnitude could be very complicated , particularly in relation to moving the archive data ,” said Tony Devert , IS Engineer , Decathlon . “ We had over six years of archive data to move to the cloud . Every application has its own particularity and would have needed to do its own migration . In other words , the project would have been chopped up into little pieces individually by application . In addition , we had the added complication that the archives included legal data that had associated required retention periods . So , we needed to have extra checks and safety measures in place that would provide proof of the correct migration of the content .
The challenge
To support the company ’ s tremendous growth and success , Decathlon made the decision to completely leave its onsite data centres and migrate to a number
“ We then explored two solutions . The first was an inhouse developed data migration tool . The second was migration through the application , which was already in use for other purposes by some of our internal users . We tried them both out on small sets of data and found
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