MAP is a leading lifestyle retailer in Indonesia, with more than 2,600 retail stores and a diverse portfolio across more than 150 brands, which includes sports, fashion, food and beverages, and lifestyle products. The organization also operates various customer-facing applications for leading retail brands, including Domino’s Pizza, Starbucks, Burger King, Digimap, Planet Sports, and Crocs.

MAP’s existing infrastructure was hosted in a local data center. The company faced a range of challenges with this on-premise environment, including a lack of scalability and flexibility, which was causing issues when it wanted to increase its external redundant data storage capabilities for backup and archiving purposes. To overcome these issues, the company decided to integrate its on-premise environment with the cloud. But it also wanted to achieve stable network connectivity and low latency with this set-up, while running intensive data analytics across its on-premise databases. At the same time, MAP’s IT departments found themselves under increasing pressure to reduce costs, making it difficult to justify additional capital expenditure (capex) investments to extend and modernize its current on-premise data centers and equipment.

This complex combination of challenges led MAP to Alibaba Cloud. As a world-class cloud service provider with redundant local data centers in Indonesia, MAP recognized Alibaba Cloud’s proven technology leadership in the public cloud space. Alibaba Cloud’s track record in professional services also provided MAP with the reassurance it needed to successfully plan and execute its migration to the cloud. Following its seamless migration to Alibaba Cloud, MAP reduced its operational expenditure, while realizing gains in its network speed and performance. The company also optimized its resources including its backup and recovery capabilities to provide seamless business continuity, while improving the end-user experience thanks to the low latency provided by the Alibaba Cloud network.

MAP achieved this by utilizing a range of our cloud-based products and solutions. These included our high-performance Elastic Compute Service (ECS) cloud servers and our Object Storage Service (OSS) to optimize its data storage capabilities. MAP also deployed our ApsaraDB for Redis solution for its NoSQL databases, and ApsaraDB for RDS for its On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP). To optimize and secure its network, MAP deployed a range of our solutions including our Server Load Balancer (SLB) service, which responds to sudden traffic spikes, distributing traffic across multiple instances to improve the service capabilities of MAP’s applications. MAP also deployed our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network to provide an isolated cloud network to operate its resources in a secure environment. When combined with our Express Connect network service, MAP could achieve a high-bandwidth, reliable and secure connection between its different environments. To further bolster its security and provide high availability, MAP deployed our Web Application Firewall (WAF), which provides real-time monitoring of its servers.

MAP continues to work with Alibaba Cloud to identify further opportunities to optimize its network and performance on the cloud. This includes a host of intelligent solutions where our DataWorks big data platform and Elasticsearch analytics solution have also provided MAP with a secure and cost-effective environment to manage and optimize its data-driven activities in the cloud.