Quick-service giant reaches for the cloud — Amazon’s cloud

Amazon’s cloud computing platform is helping Dunkin’ Brands secure its customer-facing processes.



Dunkin’ Brands, parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, migrated its mobile applications, e-commerce websites, and key corporate IT infrastructure applications from on-premises infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. The transition is designed to help the brand increase scalability, reliability, availability, security, reduce costs, and improve the digital experience for customers across both brands.



The company has a number of digital customer-facing applications, such as its mobile apps and e-commerce websites, which Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins customers frequently use to review the menu, order ahead, and redeem rewards, pay for orders or send virtual gift cards.



In addition to providing high performance, reliability, and security across these touch points, AWS has enabled Dunkin’ Brands to maintain high availability during peaks in usage. For example, key events such as National Donut Day and popular timeframes such as the holiday season drive significant volume peaks across these key applications.



However, it was increasingly difficult to predict and manage the on-premises capacity needed to provide an optimal digital experience for its guests during these times. AWS solves the issue, since support easily and reliably scales up and down as needed. The company has also migrated internal corporate IT infrastructure applications to AWS to reduce costs and increase availability, according to Dunkin’ Brands.



The company began its migration to AWS with development and test workloads and websites. After benefiting from lower costs, faster innovation rates, and improved reliability, Dunkin’ Brands migrated critical, customer-facing and corporate IT infrastructure applications, according to AWS.



“Our mobile applications and digital properties are an absolutely critical way through which we reach our customers, and they must be secure, available, and high performing at all times,” said Santhosh Kumar, VP, infrastructure, data security and privacy at Dunkin’ Brands. “We selected AWS as our cloud infrastructure provider for these key business applications due to the depth and breadth of the AWS services, and their experience in securely managing enterprise applications.”



AWS also provides Dunkin’ with redundancy that helps the chain meet its goals of high reliability and availability, robust security and optimal performance for our applications, and the ability to quickly add capacity on demand when needed, Kumar added.