UK retail giant achieves major savings and simplifies IT Management with CloudM

The customer: a leading UK retail organization

Our customer is one of the UK’s leading fashion retailers, with over 45,000 employees, more than 450 stores, and several distribution centers across the UK.

The retail industry has a notoriously high staff turnover rate – over 50% in the UK, according to the British Retail Consortium. This high turnover significantly impacted the business, particularly because of the need for frequent, resource-heavy offboarding processes.

The challenge: reducing costs, saving time and standardizing processes

The retailer faced challenges with archived ex-employee data due for renewal. The change from free VFE licenses to expensive Google Archive User (AU) licenses and the need to manually complete an average of 1,000 offboarding processes per month prompted them to seek a solution. Their goals included reducing costs, saving time, and standardizing processes.

They required a solution to:

– Securely store ex-employee data in compliance with data regulation laws.

– Achieve significant cost savings.

– Standardize the offboarding process across departments, reducing manual intervention and freeing up the IT team for strategic initiatives.

The solution

To meet their ex-employee data retention requirements, the retailer selected CloudM Archive. This solution:

• Allowed them to avoid the high renewal costs of Google AU licenses.
  
• Enabled them to retain data ownership in their chosen Google Cloud Storage bucket.
• Provided the option to restore data if needed.

To address their manual offboarding efforts and minimize the risks of human error, the retailer also implemented CloudM Automate. Its powerful, set-and-forget workflows transformed their offboarding process into a streamlined operation triggered with a single click.

The outcome: significant savings and seamless processes

The retailer avoided the expensive transition of 3,000 VFE licenses to Google AU licenses, saving $350,000 over a two-year period. By leveraging CloudM Archive, they eliminated the need for AU licenses while meeting compliance requirements and securely storing data at a fraction of the cost. CloudM Archive delivers savings of up to 75% compared to AU license costs.