
case study
Scholl Website Migration
Building out Scholls IT Infrastructure and accelerating their migrations to the AWS Cloud.

The Brief
As part of the Yellow Wood Partners acquisition of Scholl from Reckitt-Benckiser, Scholl needed to carve out their IT infrastructure rapidly! Cloud Elemental was the chosen AWS Partner to accelerate their migration to the AWS public cloud while also ensuring the 6 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework were followed.
Cloud Elemental successfully performed the following:
Create new, greenfield AWS Accounts & integrate Single-Sign On with Scholl’s Azure AD.
Migrate 21 global websites and over 100 domains from Reckitt-Benckiser’s estate to AWS.
Rebuild and migrate DevOps CI/CD pipelines to AWS.
Improve availability, alerting and monitoring.
Simplify administration and maintenance.
Variables
Scholl required an experienced AWS Partner to migrate their global websites and domains to greenfield AWS accounts. The challenges we faced and overcame were:
Sites were hosted on legacy Content Management System (CMS) running on Windows & Docker.
CMS updates done via legacy Jenkins pipelines deploying to Development, Test and Production environments.
Websites and content were tightly integrated with a number of digital catalogues, eCommerce and internal systems.
Infrastructure was over 8 years old, built by a number of DevOps who have subsequently left with little to no documentation.

our approach
Our approach to the migration of the Aligne trading platform to the AWS cloud.
Our Approach & Proposed Timeline
Our 6-step approach to meeting Scholls’ needs.

Centralised Security with Azure AD Federation

Securing Scholl with Azure AD Federation, AWS Organisations and AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) simplified the management and enabled a seamless user experience while enforcing strict adherence to security standards and access.
As shown below, users must have multi-factor authentication (MFA) and fine-grained access is granted to AWS Accounts as users are mapped to SSO Permission Sets, e.g. job roles.

When a user leaves the organisation, they follow the existing off-boarding process and are simply removed from the Azure Active Directory which effectively also removes all AWS and application access. Password complexity, age and additional sign in methods are also managed centrally from Azure AD removing additional overhead from Scholl’s IT staff.
Higher Availability, Scalability and Insurance
Scholl’s website, application servers and digital catalogue were migrated to highly durable storage and auto-scaled servers and container technologies complemented with the RDS database service across multiple availability zones.

Backups were automated across multiple accounts with domain health checks and failover.
Final Result
The migration of Scholl’s domains and infrastructure to new AWS accounts resulted in more scalability, performance and higher availability.
The new platform also gave Scholl the opportunity to refactor their digital catalogue and rebrand while providing custom access and permissions to 3rd party web developers without additional maintenance overheads.
With the help of Cloud Elemental and AWS, Scholl are successfully self-managing and self-hosting securely in the public cloud, in summary the benefits gained were: