Northgate Market shifts away from physical data centers

Regional grocer launches infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) initiative.

Northgate Market, which operates 40 grocery stores in Southern California, has partnered with Pimcore and SADA Systems to migrate all its servers from on-premises and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The initiative is geared to help Northgate Market add value to its infrastructure by replacing multiple on-premises data centers with a standardized and scalable cloud-based environment. This has helped improve the robustness of the IT services by enhancing control of utilization, security, and monitoring.

Over the past few years, Northgate had increased investments in its infrastructure hardware systems for on-premises and colocation data centers, and also leveraged AWS for many applications. As the older infrastructure had run its course and was no longer able to support the company’s maturing digital needs, Northgate decided to move ahead with an IaaS model on the GCP. The retailer selected GCP based on factor such as control it provides over virtual machines (VMs), along with the ability for live migrations.

Pimcore, which also provides product information management and master data management solutions to Northgate, is managing processes such as change management, security, data governance, and 24x7 monitoring, as well as escalations. By using a single cloud platform, Northgate is reducing rogue environments and ensuring increased data integrity and security. Moving away from a physical architecture has reduced geographical restrictions for data-focused tasks, and improved performance by reducing latency.

“It is clear that the future is in leveraging cloud services, not hardware. We recognized we needed to reinvent our strategy and really future proof our infrastructure, and Google Cloud Platform was exactly what we were looking for,” said Harrison Lewis, CIO, Northgate. “Pimcore was instrumental assisting us in rationalizing our server environment resulting in a 60% reduction in server count. And, they assisted in preparing our data, network, application, and security architectures along with our talented IT associates for the cloud.”