A leading retail enterprise headquartered in Dubai, with extensive operations across the globe, needed to modernise the infrastructure supporting its business-critical applications to improve scalability and reliability. The organisation relies on ERP, business intelligence, sales, and retail operations platforms for its business operations, and these systems are critical during month-end processing and peak promotional periods.
The organisation’s on-premise infrastructure, hosted by a third-party provider, could no longer meet operating demands. Scalability constraints, limited disaster recovery capabilities, and growing performance risks made continued reliance on the legacy environment increasingly difficult. Black Box migrated the organisation’s critical workloads to Microsoft Azure, taking full ownership of architecture, migration, governance, and postmigration support.
The organisation’s ERP, BI, and sales applications ran on a shared on-premise environment that was not built for the scale the business had reached. During month-end processing and promotional periods, the infrastructure could not consistently meet demand, creating latency, performance degradation, and availability risk across distributed retail operations.
There was no structured Disaster Recovery (DR) capability in place. A failure during a critical business period carried direct commercial risk. Legacy system dependencies had not been fully documented, adding complexity to migration planning. The engagement required strong governance, detailed dependency mapping, and near-zero downtime execution from the outset.
Black Box designed and deployed an Azure landing zone aligned to enterprise governance standards, establishing the required networking, identity, security, and monitoring foundation before migration. Compute was hosted on Azure Virtual Machines and VM Scale Sets, with storage enabled through Managed Disks and File Shares. Network security was implemented using Azure Virtual Networks, FortiGate firewall, and VPN Gateway, while Microsoft Entra ID supported identity management.
The migration covered ERP, business intelligence, pointof- sale applications, SQL Server databases, and integration services. A structured wave-based approach helped manage dependencies, reduce migration risk, and protect business continuity while moving critical workloads to Azure.
CHALLENGES
SOLUTIONS
RESULTS
BENEFITS
The organisation eliminated critical performance bottlenecks, enabling ERP, BI, and sales systems to scale reliably during month-end processing and promotional periods. Production cutover was completed within the planned maintenance window without unplanned downtime, ensuring uninterrupted retail operations across distributed locations.
A structured disaster recovery capability was introduced, with RTO targets achieved across critical applications during failover testing. Azure Monitor and Log Analytics improved operational visibility, while faster provisioning increased agility. The migration delivered a resilient Azure platform, helping the client improve uptime to 99.999% and maintain business continuity.
This engagement reflects Black Box’s capability to deliver enterprise-scale cloud migration in the MEA region. Black Box held full ownership of architecture, migration, testing, and governance across a multi-wave programme covering business-critical workloads. Structured dependency mapping, risk tracking, and stakeholder alignment kept the project on schedule and enabled cutover within the maintenance window without disruption.
Publishing Date: June 25th, 2026
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Industry: Retail
Solution: Data Center, Networking & Connectivity, DC Support Services, DC Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Security, Identity And Access Management , Enterprise Networking, Cloud Networks, Wide Area Networks,
