Big Data Impact:Unilever Case Study

Unilever is a multinational consumer goods manufacturer dealing with food, refreshments, personal care products etc. Headquartered at London, this consumer goods giant was formed by the merger of Margarine Unie and Lever Brothers.

Problem Statement:

Unilever needed to redesign its infrastructure to support the digital marketing.Previously, Unilever data centers were discrete and different from each other in terms of technology, location and management procedures.

The primary objective of Unilever was to standardize the data storage environment to faster the response to the digital market.The IT department decided to use the cloud for this purpose.

Factors For Choosing AWS:-

After a comprehensive review involving more than 16 companies, Unilever chose Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Unilever’s priorities:-

•    Flexibility
•    Global infrastructure
•    Improved Technology
•    A rich ecosystem of members

With AWS, Unilever has the same hosting provider for all regions, which means it doesn’t have to customize and tweak hosting solutions region-wise.Unilever spokesperson tells that Unilever is focused on delivering great brands to consumers; so it did not want to waste its resources and manpower for maintaining IT infra.Now,Unileverspends less and gets more innovation by working with AWS and members of the AWS Partner Network.

Goals for AWS Migration:

•    Deliver a common technology platform for websites with regional content delivery architecture
•    Migrate existing web properties to the cloud

Platform Development:-

•    First,Unilever attended an AWS workshop to design the architecture
•    a pilot platform was built for disaster recoveryfor stakeholder review
•    Storage of backup data, snapshots, product and recipe media files in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
•    Use ofEBS Snapshot Copy to copy Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots
To protect the confidential data,Unilever prepared disaster recovery solution to protect content management system, content deployment architecture, and many sensitive web properties in AWS cloud.

Components Used:-

• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Windows and Linux for use on approximately 400 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)[provides flexibility for deployments and access to the Internet]
• Auto Scaling as well as manual scaling for sites and scaling the instances based on the nature of a campaign’s popularity.
• Deploying instances across different AWS Regions and Availability Zones and use Amazon EBS snapshots to bring services back
• Pre-production and production environments on AWS for migrating existing websites into cloud platform
Benefits:- 

• Improved business agility and operational efficiency.

• Time to launch of requesting a website for a digital marketing campaign from two weeks to an average of two days.

• Time savin

• Easy to set up a standard billing model for websites.

• Focus only on innovation rather than infrastructure.

• Improved responsiveness

• High Level Customer care of AWS for post-production issues and business continuity suggestions