About Cotton On

Cotton On is an Australian retail chain, known for its fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. It has almost 1200 stores in 12 countries and employs 17,000 staff in Australia and internationally.

Challenge

Due to massive international growth, Cotton On was opening new distribution centres and offices around the world, requiring the setup of new global data centres to meet CottonOn’s standard. This required a long lead time to select a local vendor, setup network connectivity, procure hardware and deploy. This could sometimes take up to three months.

Cotton On Distribution Centres operate 24/7 all year, which required the desired solution to provide highly available services that could ensure any interruptions could be resolved within a short timeframe.

Solution

Cotton On engaged Acurus to develop a cloud strategy to met an initial need for deploying new distribution centres and offices in the UK and Malaysia while considering future requirements for other regions and services. Acurus conducted initial design workshops with Cotton On’s team to determine required dates for commissioning the new sites. After formulating the project plan, the new regions were built and delivered to Cotton On teams for application builds and go live.

Acurus deployed the solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions based out of the UK and Asia, with servers and network split across multiple datacentres to meet the availability targets.

Success

Acurus worked with Cotton On to deliver its UK and Asian datacentre services within two weeks of completing the design, much faster than previous delivery timeframes. This enabled Cotton On to focus on the successful launch of their international sites without having to worry about IT services.

The Acurus-designed service is flexible and scales quickly as international operations grow, providing a pay-as-you-grow cost model. This avoids the need to procure and implement large amounts of hardware from day one.