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Citrus Consulting Services is the Consulting and the Transformation Services arm of Redington Gulf.

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Tamimi Markets Modernizes IT Infrastructure with Migration to AWS Cloud

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Tamimi Markets is one of Saudi Arabia’s fastest-growing grocery chains, and Saudi shoppers have awarded the company a Top 100 Saudi Brand five times in the last six years. Our goal is to be the best supermarket in the kingdom, focusing on customer service, quality, freshness, variety, and reasonable prices every day.

For many Saudis and expatriates, Tamimi Markets is their preferred supermarket. Our spacious, well-stocked, and affordably priced supermarkets stock the best local and regional brands, as well as a diverse assortment of excellent vegetables, meats, fish, cheeses, and home items.

Tamimi Markets is a Saudi Arabian corporation with headquarters in Al Khobar and is a subsidiary of the Tamimi Group, which is located in Dammam. We presently have over 20 supermarkets in Saudi Arabia, including Al Hasa, Al Khobar, Aqrabiyah, Dammam, Doha, Jeddah, Jubail, and Riyadh, with plans to more than double our store count by 2020.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Tamimi Markets encountered the following challenges which inclined them to evaluate and leverage public cloud platforms:

1.With rapidly growing business in the KSA Region, Tamimi Markets data center was unable to keep up with the pace. It was getting expensive to scale, with a large upfront capital required for scaling the data center and time consumed in placing the orders for the hardware and its delivery.
2.Customer needed to save the upfront capital to be invested scaling up the existing on-premise data center.
3.Customer used various reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis which took a while to be generated in their existing SAP systems.
4.Customer needed a scaled up and flexible infrastructure for their existing SAP environment without any time delay and with a quicker go to market strategy.
5.Last challenge for Tamimi Markets was that this deployment of their IT Ecosystem on cloud was the very first experience for them, which had to be allayed by seamless delivery and swift migration from on premise to AWS.

SOLUTION HIGHLIHGTS

Tamimi Markets Infrastructure is running on AWS Cloud, where various AWS services have been deployed with respect to the customer Requirement such as CloudTrail, CloudWatch, IAM in order to protect data, restrict Access, monitoring of security related activities and generate automated responses.

Tamimi used AWS CloudTrail in order to enable Governance, Auditing and compliance monitoring. CloudTrail helped Tamimi to record each API activity and made sure that every API is written to a log. Similarly, AWS CloudWatch was implemented for monitoring the resources which are being used and maintaining them accordingly. It helped them in collecting logs and metrics data. Also, AWS IAM enabled the customer to securely control access to the AWS resources which have been deployed, this service helped them to manage number of users and creating groups to manage different kind of users.

Each EC2 instance has an attached Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume, a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale. This pairing of EC2 instances and EBS Volumes resides safely in the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The VPC then provisions a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where the resources were launched in a defined virtual network. The VPC was divided into a public subnet and three private subnets, where each private subnet was host to its own inter-related suite of applications.

Tamimi Markets also used other services of AWS like CloudTrail which enables governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing along with a service for monitoring and observability named Amazon CloudWatch. Finally, AWS Systems Manager was setup for Tamimi Markets for visibility and control of infrastructure on AWS. AWS Systems Manager also provided a unified user interface so that Tamimi Markets’s personnel can view operational data from multiple AWS services thereby allowing them to automate operational tasks across varied AWS resources.

Tamimi Markets infrastructure contained a dedicated VPC on AWS Cloud

  • A Multi AZ approach is utilized for HA
  •  Private subnets are provisioned to isolate workloads.
  • CloudTrail is deployed to record events occurring on AWS account
  • AWS Managed Backup is configured to ensure business continuity
  • AWS marketplace based SDWAN solution is used to extend on-premise network to cloud
  • CloudWatch is configured to monitor the servers
  • Alarms are configured to trigger SNS email topics
  • IAM roles have been configured for teams, departments, and individuals.
  • AWS Marketplace Solution has been configured for security as well the S3 for application backups.

Step 1: Meeting with Stakeholders

Citrus scheduled a readiness assessment meeting with key stakeholders including the Security Team, Network Team, Infra Lead, Application Lead, Operation Lead, and Business Unit Head to discuss the goals for migrating applications to AWS. The team discussed short-term and long-term objectives, risks, and issues related to IT and business application migrations.

Step 2: Analysis of Results

After cross-presentation with the customer, the Citrus team analyzed the results and built an out-brief pitch that contained summary observations and next steps to fill the identified gaps. This was required to build a statement of work for closing the identified gaps and completing the suggested next plan of action.

Step 3: Review of Current AWS Footprint

Citrus reviewed the client’s current AWS footprint, applications, operational processes, and integration. The team had discussions on various topics related to the migration process, including business, governance, people, platform, operations, and security.

The assessment also involved resource discovery using Live Optics tool for collecting and analyzing the data in the client’s IT environment. The tool was used to identify areas where the entire system could operate more efficiently at a potentially lower cost.

Step 4: Migration Process

Citrus presented the customer with a high-level AWS migration plan that included project preparation, project governance, project kick-off, landscape setup, server deployment, AWS readiness, sandbox environment on AWS, and setting up development/production environments. Re-hosting candidates (APP Servers) were migrated using AWSCloudEndure, while Re-Platform was done for the Hana DB servers using Backup and Restore.

Step 5: Migration Pilot

To ensure a smooth migration, Citrus executed a mock data transfer by moving data backup file from on-premises to AWS Cloud. This allowed the team to estimate the time required for data transfer. A sandbox system was created as a pilot environment, and a mock migration was undertaken before the real production migration. Data points acquired from the pilot, such as data transfer issues, restoration challenges, time length, and data corruption challenges, were used to plan for the final production switch over.

RESULTS AND BENEFITS DELIEVERED TO CUSTOMER

  1. Successful setup of the end-to-end SAP infrastructure on AWS:
  • Improved efficiency and reliability of Tamimi Market’s SAP infrastructure.
  • Increased flexibility and scalability of SAP infrastructure to meet changing business needs.
  1. Seamless authentication of users without causing any disruption or change in the way applications were being accessed earlier:
  • Reduced user friction and improved user experience.
  • Minimized downtime and disruptions, ensuring business continuity.
  1. Successful setup of CloudWatch and CloudTrail Services along with appropriate metrics for monitoring the infrastructure. Also, various alarms for different thresholds were setup for these metrics:
  • Improved infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities.
  • Faster response times to issues or anomalies, reducing the impact of downtime on business operations.
  1. Successful configuration of snapshot backup for all the virtual machines in the AWS infrastructure environment:
  • Ensured data security and availability through regular backups.
  • Reduced the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster.
  1. An approximate reduction of about 20% in the maintenance costs and overhead costs for Tamimi’s SAP Environment setup on AWS:
  • Significantly reduced operational expenses for Tamimi Market.
  • Increased cost savings and profitability for the company.
  1. A complete change to focus on the OPEX model from a CAPEX model which lowered the TCO by nearly 35%:
  • Reduced capital expenditures for Tamimi Market.
  • Increased financial flexibility and agility for the company.
  1. Complete backup of the entire system at the lowest cost possible for Tamimi Market:
  • Reduced infrastructure maintenance costs for the company.
  • Ensured data security and availability through regular backups.
  1. Complete transition from a CAPEX Model of payment to the OPEX Model instead thereby changing the focus to monthly payments for the services used:
  • Reduced capital expenditures for Tamimi Market.
  • Increased financial flexibility and agility for the company.
  1. Complete management of the various access to AWS services and resources securely. Configured IAM with various users and groups with designated permissions:
  • Improved security and control of access to AWS resources.
  • Reduced the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive data or infrastructure.
  1. Achieved 100% successful test results for alpha, beta, user-acceptance and stress test scenarios and subsequent use cases:
  • Improved infrastructure performance and stability.
  • Reduced the risk of system failures or downtime during critical business operations.
  1. Ensured 100% business continuity for Tamimi Markets through 24/7 Managed Support Services rendered by Citrus Consulting Services:
  • Reduced the risk of downtime and disruptions to critical business operations.
  • Increased confidence and trust in the reliability of Tamimi Market’s SAP infrastructure.