The Magic Minute

Date: August 2021

Integration and alignment with zero downtime

“Skye Cloud transferred our critical core infrastructure by one minute past midnight. This enabled us to be ready for trading in 37 of our branches by 7am the next morning”

LEE BROCKLEHURST

Group IT Manager, Blue Diamond Group

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In 2019, Blue Diamond, the 2nd biggest garden centre group in the UK and channel islands were growing. They acquired 7 major independent garden centres as well as a further 9 centres acquired from The Wyevale Group.

The problem

Always on, fast moving data demands can ‘t be taken for granted – especially for retail businesses – and every second really does counts. All the newly acquired sites came with a range of disparate telecoms systems and circumstances which led to productivity, efficiency and costs issues. Issues ranged from the hosting – the Blue Diamond platform was hosted physically on site in Guernsey to various desperate ISPs to poor network coverage across sites - some of which spanned over 70 acres, All needed integrating and aligning and crucially, not to the detriment of any sales or any downtime.

“Every minute counts with cloud computing, up-time is crucial every second of every day. So when Blue Diamond, Europe’s biggest garden centre asked us to transfer their critical core infrastructure, across 37 UK sites, our team had to work their magic and deliver it seamlessly in one minute past midnight. ”

JAMES BISHOP

Managing Director, Skye Cloud

Our approach

Working with specialist partners we designed a bespoke cloud solution including a unified communications system which included a bespoke DECT solution to cover the vast areas of the garden centres. We migrated all systems to the cloud and did this with a solution enabling Blue Diamond to maintain uptime to deliver on their high level of customer service.

The results

37 UK retail sites, over 300 staff, 1,100 email accounts, over 1,000 mobile devices, over 10TB of data , dozens of virtual private servers, across multiple data centre, all successfully migrated to a new unified system by 00:01

“Since that magic minute Skye Cloud have more than met our high standards guaranteeing 100% uptime”

LEE BROCKLEHURST

Group IT Manager, Blue Diamond Group