Dufry reduces costs 50% by migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
The retail network adopts OCI to maintain local management of applications in Brazil, increasing security, availability, and performance.
Brazil | Retail
“Production provisioning became easier and faster with OCI, and we are now paying for what we actually use. We have also streamlined the test and implementation of new environments. Before, it would take up to a day and a half to provision a machine, but now Dufry can do that in just a few minutes.”
Business challenges
The largest retail company for travelers, Dufry operates 5,500 stores across 75 countries and 1,200 locations, including airports, ports, cruise ships, train stations, and other tourist areas. In Brazil, in addition to Duty Free stores in 9 airports, the company manages Duty Paid stores, located in domestic terminals at 18 airports, as well as other convenience stores.
Due to tax and customs legislation in Brazil, Dufry's business is highly regulated, which demands maintaining a series of corporate applications to comply with requirements. Until two years ago, the company kept its entire application core in Dufry's global data center in Switzerland and had only a few local applications in an on-premises data center in Brazil.
The company’s initial idea was to consolidate everything in the global data center, helping to ensure that all security practices were seamlessly deployed around the world. However, when undergoing a comprehensive system restructuring, Dufry decided to look for an infrastructure that would host core operational applications in Brazil to not only maintain local support and management, but also to follow the company's global safety standards.
Dufry estimates that OCI’s on-demand scalability reduced its operating costs by about 50%.
Why Dufry chose Oracle
After a thorough review, Dufry decided to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The retailer conducted a proof-of-concept and discovered that OCI would help it better manage expenses because the company would pay for only what it consumed. In addition, the ability to scale on demand would help Dufry measure and adjust the machine power according to sales seasonality and internal operations.
Results
Since the migration to OCI, Dufry estimates that it has reduced its operational costs by about 50%, due to the system’s on-demand scalability. Cost savings from no longer needing to make large upfront investments in provisioning infrastructure gave the infrastructure team more funds to disburse over time.
Meanwhile, OCI's flexibility helps the company measure machine performance so that customers do not experience performance impacts while shopping in-store or online. With OCI, Dufry's IT team manages data, applications, and network layers on a single view, which streamlines decision-making. In addition, provisioning became faster and easier with OCI, helping Dufry to streamline the process to test and implement new environments, which can be complete in only a few minutes. With OCI’s high availability, the IT team moved away from operational functions to focus on more strategic business tasks. The company also enjoyed increased security because every database within OCI is encrypted by default, either at rest or in transit. Dufry is further protected from security vulnerabilities thanks to regular updates to Oracle applications, systems, and databases.
About the customer
Dufry is the largest retail company for travelers with about 5,500 stores across 75 countries and 1,200 locations, including airports, ports, cruise ships, train stations, and other tourist areas. In Brazil, the company operates more than 50 stores under the Duty Free brand.