How a UK retail giant saved a LOT of time and money with CloudM

A UK based high street retail giant with over 500 stores across the UK, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and a global online presence, employing nearly 50,000 staff worldwide. With over a century and a half of retail experience, they cater for 5 million+ active customers globally in 70 countries, specializing in Clothing, Footwear, Accessories and Home products.

Even after 150 years, this retailer actively researches and invests in the latest technologies, including eCommerce, digital transformation and security, to keep their processes moving forward and continue to offer greater value to their customers.

The retailer wanted to cut down license cost as their VFE licenses were due to be renewed as costly Google AU licenses, whilst also retaining the data in accordance to data regulation laws.

Offboarding was also taking them too long with an average of 1000 offboarding processes a month eating up the valuable time of their IT team. They also wanted to be able to standardize the process across all departments to speed up offboardings and avoid costly human error.

The retailer had spoken to us several years previously about our user management software before ultimately, and unsuccessfully, choosing a competitor. Upon reengaging with CloudM, they were pleasantly surprised by not only the growth and maturity of the product modules and features, but the attentive, professional and knowledgeable service they received throughout.

Being a company of their size, they wanted to make sure that CloudM would be a good fit for them long term. Our Sales Architects quickly allayed any fears that they had with a series of product demos with senior members from their IT team, explaining how CloudM Automate and CloudM Archive modules would combine to deliver a seamless process for their administrators, as well as scoping out potential issues.

As soon as the customer started to use CloudM, our Customer Success Team was on hand to guide them through the initial stages, helping them to set up their roles, groups and offboarding policies and archive storage buckets.

“CloudM pay for themselves - We saved so much in license costs and the amount of time and resource needed to do really quite simple tasks.”

As far as returns on investment go, few are as quick and evident as the saving the retailer made by simply using CloudM Archive and Google Cloud Storage as an alternative to transitioning to Google Archive User (AU) licenses.

With almost 3000 free VFE accounts due to transition to paid AU licenses at their next renewal, the business was looking at an eye watering bill of nearly $350,000 over the next two years alone. CloudM helped to eliminate that need with CloudM Archive, allowing them to keep all their user data, securely and totally compliant, at a fraction of the cost. CloudM Archive has been proven to save customers as much as 75% compared to renewing to AU licenses.

But ROI shouldn’t be counted in purely financial terms alone. Time can be equally as valuable as money. Our offboarding features allowed the retailer’s IT team to easily build bespoke workflows, customizable for each Organizational Unit and Smart Team, so the entire offboarding process is automated and triggered with one button. As they routinely offboarded around 1000 users a month, we worked out that CloudM would save them an incredible 21 full days on manual offboarding tasks…every single month. Even better, with CloudM Automate, they no longer have to rely on GAM scripts or continually accessing the Google Admin Console.

Now, their IT teams can get on with the important tasks, assured that we are taking good care of the monotonous offboarding work in the background.