Executive Summary

Dubai-based Sharaf Group was founded in 1968 and has since expanded into multiple brands and businesses, employing more than 9,000 staff, and operating in 54 countries. Its IT infrastructure was a complicated mix of on-premises and cloud systems that were managed by separate third parties. The group's retail division Sharaf Retail worked with AWS Partner Zero&One to transform its infrastructure by migrating all its servers, business applications, and databases to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This resulted in a 50 percent reduction in IT staff costs, 65 percent reduction in infrastructure costs, and slashed the go-to-market lead time for opening new stories by 75 percent.

Sharaf Retail Plans Digital Transformation to Solve Growing Pains

Sharaf Group, founded in 1968, is a Dubai-based organization that operates businesses in a range of verticals including retail, shipping, logistics, travel, tourism, and IT. The organization's retail company was founded in 1992 and has been growing and diversifying ever since. It currently employs more than 800 staff, and operates in five countries across the Middle East and South-East Asia.
The organization's retail division, Sharaf Retail, had been expanding rapidly with multiple acquisitions and new stores opening regularly in Indonesia, Malaysia, UAE, Oman, and Bahrain. Its sprawling IT infrastructure was a complicated mix of servers and on-premises data centers, which were outsourced and managed by different third parties. The company knew it was wasting money overprovisioning resources and its IT team was under constant pressure maintaining its service contracts and firefighting technical issues.

The company wanted to simplify and consolidate its infrastructure and migrate to the cloud so it could spend less time managing technology and more time growing its business. “We are a retailer, so maintaining hardware and applications is not our specialty,” says Eshan Walia, head of digital transformation at Sharaf Retail. “We wanted to focus on retail and leave IT to the experts.”
Sharaf Retail evaluated several cloud providers and chose AWS because of its diverse range of managed services and its reputation for security and reliability. As it lacked in-house cloud expertise to help manage the digital transformation, it chose to work with Dubai-based AWS Partner Zero&One.

Zero&One Transforms Sharaf Retail's Infrastructure in 5 Months

The project started in late 2022 with Zero&One working with Walia's team to build a multi-phase, 3-year roadmap to transform its infrastructure by migrating to the cloud. Work on the first phase started in January 2023. With Zero&One's support the company was able to successfully migrate its servers, databases, point of sale (POS) system, and stock management software to AWS in 5 months.

Zero&One used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. The AWS Partner performed a redesign and repositioning for all servers and protected the infrastructure using AWS Security Hub, which automates AWS security checks and centralizes security alerts. To safeguard the applications, it used AWS Shield, a managed denial-of-service protection service.

Using AWS Cuts Infrastructure Costs by 65% and Go-to-Market Lead Time by 75%

Walia says completing the first phase of the project created instant benefits, including slashing the time taken to open new retail outlets by more than 75 percent. Previously, prior to opening a new store, Sharaf Retail’s operations and IT teams would have to order new servers and arrange for the systems to be installed and configured, a process that would take at least a month. Now the POS system is cloud-based, it can be easily replicated, reducing the total go-to-market time for opening a new store. “I can now launch a POS system anywhere in the world in a few hours,” said Walia. “The time to market has been slashed from at least a month down to less than a week, and I don’t need to send staff to the new location to set it all up.”

Sharaf Retail has opened about 20 new stores in the past year and plans to continue growing at this pace for the foreseeable future. Using AWS means Walia’s team no longer worries about server capacity or reliability. “Using AWS means it always works and we only pay for the resources we use,” says Walia. “I estimate this year we will save about 65 percent on infrastructure spending compared to our on-premises setup.”

Much of Sharaf Retail’s on-premises hardware was nearing end of life so migrating to AWS improved the general performance of its apps. It also significantly reduced the workload of Sharaf Retail’s IT team. “My IT team costs have fallen by 50 percent because now instead of wasting time monitoring the on-premises activities and dealing with multiple contractors, we only have one contact—Zero&One,” says Walia.

AWS Migration Centralizes Backups, Enables Disaster Recovery and Compliance

Another advantage of using cloud-based servers over physical servers is that Sharaf Retail’s backup and disaster recovery (DR) system is now reliable and effective. Walia says that previously, backup was a difficult process to manage centrally, and the company didn’t have a company-wide DR strategy. “Using AWS, our backups are now automatic and reliable,” says Walia. “If there is a disaster in one area then the system instantly switches to an alternative, so my users don’t even notice the change.”

Having control over servers and being able to choose where information is physically stored was important for Sharaf Retail because of the UAE’s new data privacy laws. The region has implemented regulations similar to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which requires certain data to physically remain within the country.

Walia says consolidating servers using AWS means he has complete control over where data is stored with the added bonus of reducing latency. “Once we complete the migration and all our systems are using AWS, we will be compliant with the UAE data privacy regulations,” says Walia. “We will also experience very low latency, we’ll be completely secure, and we will be able to scale and expand as necessary.”

Data and Analytics Drive Expansion Strategy

When Zero&One has completed the migration of Sharaf Retail’s ERP and application development systems using AWS, the final phase of the transformation will be a customer loyalty scheme, which is due to be completed by the end of 2023. This will allow the company to start collecting and using customer data to make more informed business decisions. “We will use Amazon S3 to create a data lake and then clean up that data and make it accessible via dashboards,” says Walia. “Then we will convert all the data into knowledge, helping our management make informed business decisions.”

The transformation project has been so successful that it has caught the eye of other companies within Sharaf Group. “Using AWS provides our business with the agility and flexibility we need in order to realize our expansion plans,” says Walia. “We have become a live business case for other companies in the Sharaf Group, and they have already started their individual cloud journeys.”

Walia says he is extremely happy with Zero&One and expects the relationship to continue long into the future. “Zero&One is the best technical partner we could have hoped for,” says Walia. “They understood our business, we trust them, and we’re very happy.”