Case Study: Guiding Loyalty NZ on its cloud transformation

Background

Loyalty NZ is a marketing, loyalty and data analytics consulting firm that, for the last two and half decades, has specialised in using data to help NZ businesses discover more about their customers so they can build long-lasting and meaningful relationships with them. Loyalty NZ’s two brands - Flybuys and Lab360 - allow them to incorporate NZ’s favourite loyalty programme with the richest customer dataset in the country, all under one roof.

The Opportunity

After 25 years of enabling New Zealand businesses to understand their customers better, Loyalty NZ’s infrastructure has naturally evolved into a complex blend of native cloud services and legacy on-prem data centres. Having begun to leverage cloud services in 2019, Loyalty NZ’s hybrid approach of combining cloud platforms with ageing legacy technology was creating significant operational complexity and technical debt. With its infrastructure negatively impacting operational efficiency and customer experience, as well as lacking comprehensive recovery capability against natural disasters, Loyalty NZ understood that a large-scale modernisation project was required to future-proof its business.

The projected cost of upgrading the underlying technology in its data centres was nothing short of eye-watering, so Loyalty NZ set out to continue its cloud transformation journey by retiring its legacy on-premise infrastructure entirely. 

The Solution

As Loyalty NZ was seeking to migrate away from large data centres and streamline and enhance their existing cloud services whilst ensuring its core systems continued to be stable, secure and accessible, this project represented a significant risk. To address this, we began with comprehensive consultation and deliberation to find a solution that would meet Loyalty NZ’s requirements and simultaneously de-risk them.

Although Loyalty NZ had already begun to use cloud services, their dependency on their existing network meant that we had to find a solution that was somewhere between the two. We landed on a transformation roadmap that would see Loyalty NZ migrate away from their data centres to VMware Cloud (VMC) and, once de-risked, eventually move to native AWS with a full modernisation programme. VMC was selected as it did not require rebuilding Loyalty NZ’s architecture which meant that we could use a lift-and-shift approach enabling Loyalty NZ to utilise its existing network, significantly reducing risk in the process. VMC was also well established in AWS and had a disaster recovery product, VMCDR, that would work out of the box.

Discover the full results of Loyalty NZ's migration to VMware on AWS by downloading our full case study below.