Giant Eagle flies to the cloud

The latest autumn migration involves grocery chain Giant Eagle.



The Pittsburgh-based, 420-plus-store retailer is in the initial stages of overhauling its IT infrastructure with a hybrid cloud solution from IBM Cloud. The new solution, based on IBM Cloud's SoftLayer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is designed to provide Giant Eagle flexible, consumption-based pricing, as well as faster procurement and customized deployment of applications.



Giant Eagle is also seeking to obtain integrated system management for greater visibility into enterprise data.



"Our goals to reposition our technology infrastructure were to achieve the scalability, security, reliability, resiliency and efficiency that the advancements in the technology are making possible without making significant capital investments," said Jeremy Gill, senior director of technology infrastructure at Giant Eagle. "IBM's full range of offerings from public cloud, private cloud and bare metal and robust security capabilities were their competitive differentiators."



Giant Eagle is currently in phase one of its rollout, which includes the deployment of the development/test and disaster recovery environments. Phase two will include migrating its production IT operations to IBM.

This implementation demonstrates how far cloud hosting has come in the past few years. No longer just a convenient means for retailers to test and deploy point solutions or obtain flexible backup capacity, hosted cloud is becoming a legitimate enterprise infrastructure option.