While technologies like gen AI grab headlines and are top of mind for business leaders, taking advantage of these advances requires efficient, modern IT environments. Migrating aging, on-prem infrastructure to the cloud can challenge any organisation, especially large companies with complex systems.

DFS, one of the largest furniture sellers in the United Kingdom, experienced this firsthand when it decided to migrate its own infrastructure and that of its sister brand, Sofology.

“We want to be a cloud-first business running on the most advanced IT,” says Craig Wilson, Head of Group Infrastructure and Architecture at DFS. “Our legacy systems were becoming increasingly inefficient and hampered growth. We needed to migrate to the cloud to achieve our goals of delivering services through modern DevOps practices, achieving security-by-design capabilities, and leveraging Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-Code.”

DFS Group worked with Google Cloud and partner Netpremacy to support large-scale landing zone projects that would improve the performance of critical systems to best meet business and customer needs.

DFS Group worked with Netpremacy to plan and execute a cloud migration focused on operational excellence and minimal business disruption. Netpremacy took the DFS team through StratoZone discovery to provide a framework to move systems to the cloud. This included evaluating workload migration options for both DFS and Sofology infrastructure.

“This migration needed to be air-tight, as any issues would directly impact customer experiences and our reputation. Engineers from DFS Group and Netpremacy worked together well to make sure the migration went smoothly, while the Google Cloud Architecture Framework provided the provisioning standard we needed.”

“Netpremacy’s expertise was invaluable as we cataloged our internal systems and evaluated which components we could lift-and-shift to the cloud and what would need to be re-factored,” says Wilson. “We also evaluated costs and timelines to transition to Google Cloud, giving us the confidence to move forward with such a large project.”

Workshops provided a common ground to establish the right landing zone for IT migration to support new services.

Once all implementation guidelines were set, Netpremacy worked with DFS to take a phased approach to the migration. DFS workloads were migrated to the new landing zone, covering Active Directory domain controllers, certificate authorities, directory sync servers, and infrastructure services. With skilled planning, this phase took only about four months from discovery to go live.

Netpremacy then helped DFS scope Sofology workloads. Sofology had a large technical debt and the decision was made to migrate the entire environment quickly to Google Cloud.

Compute Engine was at the center of the migration, with Netpremacy leveraging the M2VMs tooling to move most DFS and Sofology VMs. Other workloads for older operating environments were rebuilt from the ground up on Compute Engine. Interconnectivity within the DFS and Sofology environment was powered by Cloud VPN, with additional systems spun up through Terraform.

“This migration needed to be air-tight, as any issues would directly impact customer experiences and our reputation,” says Wilson. “Engineers from DFSGroup and Netpremacy worked together well to make sure the migration went smoothly, while the Google Cloud Architecture Framework provided the provisioning standard we needed.”

With its infrastructure on Google Cloud, DFS can now realise its cloud-first philosophy for IT provisioning, delivery, and innovation. Importantly, all of the work that went into the migration gave the DFS team a wealth of new Google Cloud knowledge, so they can operate more autonomously on complex projects.

“We migrated a finance system, and we’re provisioning new infrastructure along with a massive telephony implementation with Google Cloud, and that’s all thanks to the knowledge my team has gained through Netpremacy,” says Wilson. “Many of the principles that we learned in the early phases of our migration are boosting our expertise as a cloud-first business.”

DFS teams used their enhanced skills and more agile cloud environment to transition away from outsourcing individual cloud projects. Because DFS engineers are now well-versed in Google Cloud, they can provision, apply control, monitor, and innovate on their own.

At the same time, The group still takes advantage of learning opportunities from Google Cloud to upskill its cloud and platform engineers, while maintaining a close working relationship with Netpremacy.

For customers, the new cloud infrastructure enables both brands to deliver more varied, responsive retail experiences.

“We migrated a finance system, and we’re provisioning new infrastructure along with a massive telephony implementation with Google Cloud, and that’s all thanks to the knowledge my team has gained through Netpremacy. Many of the principles that we learned in the early phases of our migration are boosting our expertise as a cloud-first business.”

For example, in the past, if DFS wanted to allow customers to work with lenders to pay for items over time, DFS had to engage private cloud companies that offered that level of security. The result was higher costs and slower turnaround to deliver services.

Today, DFS can manage its infrastructure through code, which has significantly accelerated work related to pay-over-time lending and other customer services.

Looking ahead, the DFS Group is exploring how it can use Google Kubernetes Engine and other Google Cloud solutions to further improve functionality, lower costs, and enhance customer experiences.

“There’s more to do, but we’ve come a long way,” says Wilson. “Our IT journey demonstrates the value of good partnerships. Having Netpremacy and Google Cloud enables us to overcome obstacles that stand between even greater IT performance and better customer service.”

✅ Enhances scalability across key services based on demand while reducing delivery time

✅ Increases organisational knowledge of cloud services to boost performance and enhance engineer engagement

✅ Modernises organisational approach to IT and builds foundation for further IT innovation