Microsoft: Azerbaijan's RAHAT Market chain builds more secure foundation for business growth

Baku. 17 January. REPORT.AZ/ By moving to the cloud, retailer RAHAT Market has not just solved a short-term problem with poor backup control, but has started to reap strategic value from a new virtual way of running its business. This has provided greater resilience, reduced hardware investment, and taken away concerns about ageing servers. Now, RAHAT Market can focus on harnessing data for business advantage.

Report informs, Turab Huseynov, the brand's IT manager said.

Turab Huseynov, IT manager at RAHAT Market, the popular Azerbaijani shopping chain, knew they needed to find a better way to protect organizational data.

RAHAT Market‘s on-premise infrastructure struggled to provide reliable business information backup, and there was little room for error in case of emergency due to limited budget for another physical disaster recovery site.

Turab Huseynov said he could not see a way out of these difficulties until a conversation with trusted local implementation partner SIP sparked an idea. Could a move to cloud clear up RAHAT Market‘s backup, disaster recovery and data protection headaches, while improving operations at a stroke?

The answer was yes, as SIP’s suggestion to embrace cloud as delivered by Microsoft has proven.

So far, all 60 of the company’s discount stores are working off Microsoft Azure, and already showing solid results.

The fact that Microsoft is presenting all this as a success story once again proves that RAHAT Market chain widely uses the new virtual way of business and provides its customers with the highest quality services.

“Once we started using Azure, we discovered many advantages that were not apparent at first. Reliability is “excellent,” the team also confirms the significant progress", Huseynov said.

But it is in the area of cost control that the move to cloud is being felt most:

“Our costs are definitely lower - not just because we no longer have to buy any server equipment, but we actually need less resources in Azure than we had on-premise”, he says.

“That’s gone down to as little as $1 a day per store, which is really helpful. The time we need to devote to maintenance has also gone down dramatically", he added.

According to Huseynov, performance has improved too, while uptime is 100% better, noting that the net result of the adoption of Azure means, “we have stopped thinking about server hardware, and now concentrate our IT resources on providing value to our customers.”

"The next step will be to enroll 20 larger stores on Azure and start exploring the power of analytics and Power BI reporting. A pretty good result for a project that started as just a way to do better backups".