Hirota and Sky.One : databases and systems in the cloud

About the company

Hirota founded in 1972, in São Paulo, by a family of Japanese immigrants. The chain has grown over the 44 years and already has 15 supermarkets spread across the city of São Paulo and the metropolitan region.

Challenge

Hirota 's growth in recent years drew the group's attention to the need to invest in a more modern and secure IT infrastructure, with autonomy to support the database and ERP systems. Over time, group employees began to face a routine of slowness, crashes, lack of HD space and link drops.

At all times we received calls from supermarkets in the chain reporting failures in the system, says Willian Vieira, Hirota's support coordinator.

The alternative found by Hirota to overcome the problem was to set up a disaster recovery. The company would commit to building a second space to house a new technology infrastructure. The main objective was to enable data recovery in case of failures. The idea, however, did not get off the ground. According to the coordinator, spending on equipment at the new center would exceed R$ 120,000:

We would have to spend on servers, nobreaks, energy, software, a large structure that would be obsolete in three or four years.

Solution

In early 2016, Hirota decided to move its database and management systems to the cloud. The decision seemed viable after considering the most modern options on the market, but it was only taken after breaking some paradigms. After all, how to convince the group's directors to replace an entire physical structure with a totally virtual system?

Amazon's partnership with Sky.One was essential. A worldwide successful player always brings support, says Vieira.

Before starting the migration, Sky.One prepared the entire cloud environment on EC2 Windows instances to receive the Hirota structure. In addition to the database, the group has cashier systems, queue control, benefit club, discounts, payroll, as well as specific software for the gas station and the restaurant.

Results

With the database and its systems in the clouds, Hirota gained speed and stability in accessing information. The need to perform manual backups and hardware upgrades is a thing of the past, allowing employees to dedicate more time to more strategic demands within the stores. In addition to the cost of opportunity, the group also recorded a drop in financial costs with servers, technicians, software licenses and mainly energy, one of Hirota's biggest sources of expense at a time of physical structure.

At all times we received calls from supermarkets in the network reporting failures in the system