Benchmark Awards 2019 Finalist: Mychemist.com.au hybrid cloud

Online retailer mychemist.com.au has taken a very modern journey to ensure its data centre utilisation rates are as high as possible.

The pharmacy also wants to avoid new spending while also making its applications portable so they can run anywhere, anytime, without degrading performance or interrupting business.

The focus of the Data Centre 2017 project was to provide a scalable data centre architecture that could allow active applications to be transported between physical data centres and the cloud without the business being aware of its location.

The online pharmacy reasoned that as long as IT maintained the required service level agreements, it should not care about an application’s location.

Along the way it’s had to learn DevOps skills, to enable rapid iteration of applications and take up its key suppliers’ newest technologies while avoiding reliance on too many bespoke solutions.

Instead, the company used off-the-shelf tools in more creative ways and limited software development to automation scripting.

This reduced the burden of legacy infrastructure and systems, decreasing the amount of time the IT team spends working on data centre technologies, allowing it to focus on further setting the company apart from its competitors.

The results are impressive: quantifiable savings of $5 million over five years. And the adoption of more agile IT practices will likely drive more benefits in future.

This project has been named a finalist in the Consumer category of the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2018/19.