CASE STUDY
cCloud-first strategy
ELARABY is a household name in Egypt . It has retail outlets throughout the country and is a major employer . The group manufactures home electronics under its own brand and sells a number of market-leading , global brands in its stores .
The business is also increasingly international . It has a growing retail presence in 22 countries , from South Africa to the United Arab Emirates and to remain competitive , it must operate to the best global standards . The business has more than 40,000 employees , 16 commercial and industrial enterprises , over 3,000 sales partners , 17 trade stores across Egypt and approximately 600 after-sales service centres . From an IT perspective , it prizes efficiency , agility and scalability .
ELARABY wants to ensure all locations and all employees are connected . It has migrated to Microsoft Office 365 and favours a cloud-first strategy : ideally , all applications will be hosted in the cloud .
“ Our use of the cloud is growing . We have already migrated one of our data centres to Azure and we are leveraging both PaaS and SaaS ,” said Medhat ElAraby , Vice President , ELARABY Group .
Inevitably , this has a huge impact on the amount of data moving between sites . For ELARABY , the challenge is to reduce data transfer costs and optimise speed .
ElAraby added that : “ We have a huge amount of data from Exchange and SAP transferring between our data centres and our sites . Latency impacts many aspects of the business , from direct sales and production , to store management and marketing .”
There was also an impact on users . After investing heavily in Office 365 , ELARABY found many users suffered slow loading times or unresponsive features due to inherent network issues , which wasn ’ t supporting the organisation ’ s vision of more connected , collaborative working .
Riverbed SaaS Accelerator and Cloud Accelerator With the help of Riverbed partner , Global Brands Group , ELARABY investigated solutions that would enhance the performance of Microsoft collaboration suites from any network . A trusted Microsoft specialist in Egypt , the Global Brands team was also ideally
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