Success Story
Adapture Optimizes Cloudflare Environment for Global Clothing Retailer
Customer Overview
The client is a well-known women’s clothing retailer with more than 1,300 stores worldwide and more than 25,000 employees. With an established in-house IT team, it was maintaining its own Cloudflare environment. However, the retailer needed an expert to review its configuration. With the busiest season approaching, it turned to Adapture to ensure that its Cloudflare environment was optimized and its e-commerce site was able to handle the holiday demand.
Business Challenges
The global retailer had Cloudflare in place but knew that elements were not configured according to best practices. Cloudflare straddles different areas of IT, including digital, DevOps, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Cloudflare’s expansive reach can make maintaining clear communication a challenge for organizations that are used to operating in silos and having one organizational stakeholder per platform. There was no documentation in place to indicate its configuration. The retailer also did not have a testing environment or redundancies in place, making implementation difficult.
Solution Requirements
The client needed someone to evaluate its existing Cloudflare environment before moving onto its overall architecture. It needed an expert to go through the environment and point out misconfigurations or potential areas of optimization so it could run efficiently and not worry about operational pitfalls. Automation and documentation needed to be put into place to make the environment more manageable for its internal team. Terraforming was necessary to enable automation of a test environment and provide a backup of the Cloudflare environment.
Our Solution
When approaching a client’s Cloudflare environment, Adapture first performs a full assessment and gap analysis before beginning the terraforming process. The gap analysis highlighted ways the client could better take advantage of their Cloudflare investment and pointed out some configurations that could be tweaked to give their visitors a better user experience. The team then terraformed the environment and used it to stand up a test environment. Over the course of the project, the Adapture team met with the retailer’s in-house IT teams during weekly calls to review the work completed and educate them on Cloudflare best practices. During those weekly meetings, the teams collaborated on specific use cases where optimization was needed.
The remediation stage of the project was handled largely by the retailer’s in-house team. Throughout the process, the Adapture team remained in an advisory role to answer questions and provide instruction and support, allowing the team to learn while still having an expert to turn to when questions arose. Anything that client could not handle due to resource constraints was remediated by Adapture in a follow-up engagement
Benefits of Solution
The worldwide clothing retailer now has a roadmap for optimization and a backup for their website as well as a testing environment to better implement changes and upgrades and prevent loss of data in the event of a disaster. Documentation was created to better understand the environment across separate IT teams. Because of the Adapture team’s Cloudflare expertise, the retailer was able to get what they needed in an accelerated timeframe. The solution was provided by Adapture over 30 days.
