Sephora is one of the leading cosmetics retailers in the world. Since its debut in France over 50 years ago, Sephora has been a global leader among prestige omni-channel retailers. It joins hands with high-end renowned brands and niche brands to provide diversified offerings for customers continually. Since 2005, Sephora has set footprints in 89 cities (with 321 stores in Mainland China), providing a full range of beauty services for more than one million consumers.

Sephora China has developed an omni-channel network that can reach customers from all walks of life and has cooperated with hundreds of upstream and downstream brands and suppliers. However, the greatest challenge Sephora China faces is how to highly optimize its omni-channel network. This includes how to maximize the omni-channel network in a cost-effective, efficient, and flexible manner to meet the increasing demands of consumers in Mainland China. As a result, Sephora China must adopt digital transformation to seek continuously optimized business processes and operations.

Management cannot obtain comprehensive, real-time, and accurate analysis of sales data, consumers, and channels in traditional business models. As a result, decision-making is time-consuming. If Sephora China adopts Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge technologies and tools, its data assets can be displayed in real-time, its decision-making will become effortless, and it can adapt to the changing market environment. This way, management can steer the company to respond to black swan events quickly (such as COVID-19) and stay updated on changing tastes and preferences of customers.

Sephora China officially launched the digitalization 2.0 project in March 2021, hoping the business transformation to the cloud continues to drive opportunities for the enterprise.

In March 2021, Sephora China partnered with Alibaba Cloud and Accenture to start a cloud migration journey to accelerate digital transformation on the cloud. At the end of November 2021, Sephora successfully migrated data from the traditional data center to the cloud, reaching a milestone in the digitalization project.

Alibaba Cloud and Accenture provide a full set of cloud computing products and services to help Sephora improve the customer experience.

● Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service - ECS is an IaaS offering that provides high-performance, stable, reliable, and scalable compute resources on the cloud. ECS eliminates the need to invest in hardware up front and helps create as many (or as few) instances as necessary based on business requirements. Therefore, ECS instances are more convenient and efficient than physical servers. ECS provides a variety of instance types that suit various business needs and help boost business growth.

● Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer - SLB distributes network traffic to a group of backend servers to increase the throughput of applications. You can use SLB to prevent service interruption caused by single points of failure (SPOFs) and improve the availability of applications.

● Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service - OSS is a secure, scalable, and highly reliable cloud storage service that allows you to store a large amount of data. OSS is designed to provide 99.9999999999% data durability and 99.995% data availability.

● ApsaraDB RDS is a stable, reliable, and scalable online database service built on top of the Apsara Distributed File System and high-performance SSDs of Alibaba Cloud. ApsaraDB RDS supports the MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB database engines. ApsaraDB RDS provides a portfolio of solutions for disaster recovery, backup, restoration, monitoring, and migration to facilitate database O&M.

● Auto Scaling is a service that automatically adjusts elastic computing resources based on your business requirements. It automatically adds ECS instances when business loads increase and removes ECS instances when business loads decrease to save costs. Auto Scaling is suitable for applications with fluctuating or stable business loads.

● Cross-region disaster recovery allows you to deploy primary systems and disaster recovery systems in different regions of Alibaba Cloud. When the primary system encounters a failure, the business system switches to the disaster recovery system. Cross-region disaster recovery deploys the primary system and disaster recovery system in different regions to provide a highly reliable disaster recovery service. This service features a recovery point objective (RPO) of as low as one minute and a recovery time objective (RTO) of as low as 15 minutes. Cross-region disaster recovery can guarantee business continuity and effectively avoid system failures caused by regional disasters.

Sephora uses Alibaba Cloud services to migrate its core business systems to the cloud seamlessly while ensuring data security and business continuity. Sephora also leverages benefits provided by cloud computing (such as on-demand usage and pay-as-you-go billing). The various features of cloud computing (such as high elasticity and flexible scalability) also help Sephora expand its business in Mainland China and handle the traffic spikes of its e-commerce business efficiently.

Sephora China implemented cross-region disaster recovery within three months using Alibaba Cloud’s extensive infrastructure. This helped Sephora China ensure the high availability of business systems and optimize disaster recovery capabilities.

After the comprehensive cloud migration of business systems, Sephora China continues to work with Alibaba Cloud by using tailored Alibaba Cloud products and solutions to create intelligent services and provide a seamless online shopping experience.