Cloud & Hybrid Architecture
ShopNow — Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Secure multi-site infrastructure for a Cameroonian e-commerce company with M365 migration and disaster recovery plan.
My role
Cloud Architect
Period
April 2026 — June 2026
AzureActive DirectoryMicrosoft 365VeeamFortiGatepfSenseMPLSIPSec VPNTerraformZabbixGrafana
Designed a hybrid cloud infrastructure for ShopNow, an e-commerce company operating across 3 sites in Cameroon (Douala, Yaoundé, Bafoussam). Mission: securely interconnect the sites, migrate to Microsoft 365, and build a robust disaster recovery plan. Controlled budget: ~€86K in year one, ~€42K recurring.
Challenges
- 01Interconnecting 3 remote sites with expensive MPLS links while guaranteeing automatic failover
- 02Migrating 47 users to Microsoft 365 without any business downtime
- 03Designing a backup strategy meeting RTO < 4h and RPO < 1h targets
Solutions
- Primary MPLS + automatic IPSec VPN failover (FortiGate/pfSense) — switch in under 30 seconds
- 7-VLAN segmentation (IT, Commerce, HR, Finance, Servers, Guest, IoT) — network isolation by functional domain
- Microsoft 365 migration in 6 independent phases over 8 weeks: 0 minutes downtime, –30% IT workload in 3 months
- Veeam local backup + Azure Blob replication: RTO 2h / RPO 30min — well below target objectives
Results
- Infrastructure live across 3 sites with tested and documented failover
- M365 migration: 30% reduction in IT administrative workload by month 3
- Year-1 budget: 56M XAF (~€86K) — in line with initial estimates
- Disaster Recovery Plan validated: actual RTO 1h45 / actual RPO 28min during the test run
A similar project?
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