ShopNow — Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Zero-downtime migration to a hybrid cloud infrastructure for a 3-site e-commerce company — validated RTO of 1h45 vs. 3 days estimated with the old setup.
My role
Cloud Architect
Period
April 2026 — June 2026
Validated Disaster RTO
Tested full recovery vs. 3 days legacy recovery time
IT Maintenance Workload
Achieved within 3 months of Microsoft 365 migration
Interconnected Sites
Primary MPLS + IPSec VPN auto-failover in < 30s
Isolated VLAN Domains
Strict segmentation for IT, Finance, Guest, and IoT
ShopNow operated its e-commerce business from a single non-redundant server in Douala. Frequent power outages and isolated remote sites (Douala, Yaoundé, Bafoussam) risked prolonged business disruption.
01. Multi-Site Challenge & Business Continuity
Operating across 3 remote sites without unified IT resulted in data silos and unsecured file sharing. Management set a strict target: modernize the infrastructure and migrate 47 users to Microsoft 365 with zero business downtime.
"Infrastructure redundancy isn't a luxury: it's the core insurance policy protecting business continuity."
02. Recovery Plan & Network Resilience
I architected a multi-site hybrid network using primary MPLS lines backed by automated IPSec VPN tunnels on FortiGate and pfSense. Backups combine local Veeam appliances with daily encrypted replication to Azure Blob Storage.
Automated Network Failover
Seamless failover from MPLS to IPSec VPN in under 30 seconds upon link outage.
6-Phase M365 Migration
Phased 8-week migration ensuring zero email downtime across all 47 corporate users.
Tested Disaster Recovery (DRP)
Actual measured RTO of 1h45 and RPO of 28 minutes during simulated datacenter disaster tests.
Hybrid Identity & Mandatory MFA
On-premise Active Directory synced with Azure AD, enforcing mandatory MFA on remote connections.
03. Financial & Operational ROI
The infrastructure is fully monitored via Zabbix and Grafana. The business case cut recurring maintenance costs from €86K to €42K/year while delivering a 99.9% availability SLA.
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