True Alliance is one of the largest retailers, distributors, and licensees of premium accessories, fashion, sports, and outdoor brands in the Australian and New Zealand markets. They are home to some of the world’s biggest fashion brands, including Lacoste, Speedo, Lee, Riders, Nautica, The North Face, UGG, and Wrangler.

Over the last decade, the online presence of True Alliance’s brands has become increasingly important to them. Year on year, eCommerce sales have made up a growing percentage of their overall sales – and even 80-90% of in-store customers now interact with the brand online before they come into a physical store. So, the experience they deliver online is incredibly important.

Originally, their eCommerce platform had been hosted internally, which was creating a range of issues:

  • Inability to scale on-demand during high-traffic events
  • Poor customer online experiences
  • Loss of web traffic and potential sales
  • Damage to brand reputation and image

True Alliance could see that continuing to manage hardware in-house was impractical, and that cloud would offer more of the flexibility they required. Thus began the search for a cloud solution.

The right solution requires the right expertise

Going into their search, True Alliance knew they needed a solution that could auto-scale their environments to meet changing demand, as well as connect to their internal corporate network. This was key to keeping sites up and maintaining a good brand experience for their customers.

After undertaking a review of potential providers, True Alliance decided to go with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We selected AWS as best of breed due to their feature set and several other factors, including the fact that they had a good presence in Australia,” says Regan. However, True Alliance’s exposure to AWS and cloud was limited, and they didn’t have any internal experience to help them kick off their AWS migration. So, AWS suggested PolarSeven as a preferred partner.

From the beginning, True Alliance knew they had found a reliable and highly knowledgeable partner.

“Engagement with PolarSeven was really good, from the initial conversation around what we’re trying to achieve all the way through deployment,” says Regan. Rather than simply take control of the project, PolarSeven guided the True Alliance team every step of the way—so they received expert deployment services while also upskilling their team – Regan MacDonald, Group IT Manager

Do it once, do it right

This initial project with PolarSeven has enabled True Alliance to further upgrade their eCommerce platform over the last couple of years, helping them to manage surging online demand and new retail expectations. It’s something they would never have been able to do if they didn’t have the initial investment and successful implementation of AWS Cloud.

But overall, the biggest lesson learnt for True Alliance was that cloud isn’t an automatic fix to hosting problems—and not all migrations are the same.

The rising costs of rents and wages are tightening the already slim margins in retail, and Regan says making sure the move is cost-effective is vital.

“The knowledge that PolarSeven provided through the workshops really helped us to understand the best way that we could proceed, and having their engineers onsite helped us to increase our team’s knowledge at the same time.”

Having experts on hand to answer questions at any time really helped True Alliance learn and recognise what best practices looked like for them. PolarSeven helped to decipher all the pieces of the cloud needed for the True Alliance business to function well and were open about potential costs and hurdles.

Regan says, “Not only did they ultimately deliver what was discussed, but they were more than willing to share their knowledge. There was no gatekeeping of information.”

Beyond that, they have an expert partner who has their best interests in mind and keeps them up to date with new AWS updates that could be beneficial for the business.

“Even once the solution was delivered, PolarSeven continued to add value by providing us with next steps – they seemed genuinely interested in helping us improve,” says Regan MacDonald. “Having someone to communicate what AWS features might be suitable for us saves us a lot of time and resources, but we still get all the benefits.”

The result? Amazing online experiences

One of the main reasons True Alliance brought on PolarSeven was their desire to implement a customised cloud solution and optimise the outcomes of the migration—which they were able to achieve. Since deployment, they’ve experienced:

  • Zero reported downtime
  • Uptime increase of 200-300%
  • Faster and more efficient change deployment
  • Reduced potential loss of sales

Solutions implemented

  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • Availability Zones (AZ)
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
  • Route53
  • Auto Scaling
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • CloudWatch
  • Network Address Translation (NAT)
  • Virtual Private Network (VPN)