Deutsche Telekom and Oriflame: A Hybrid Beauty

More businesses are shifting to cloud services, but your infrastructure doesn’t have to be an entirely public or private affair. Swedish cosmetics company Oriflame shows that a hybrid approach is often the best option.

Ten percent of all businesses refrain from using public cloud services of any kind. Another ten percent want to put all of their company data into the public cloud. For the rest, however, a hybrid option combining both on-premise resources and the public cloud is often the best approach. Oriflame, an international beauty company from Sweden, also uses a hybrid model – thanks to Deutsche Telekom.

Selling directly to customers, Oriflame is present in more than 60 countries and offers cosmetic products through sales consultants and via its e-shop. In addition to about 7,500 full-time employees, a team of 3.6 million independent consultants offers a wide range of high-quality organic beauty products. The company has production facilities in Sweden, Poland, China, Russia, and India with more than 100 scientists working in its global research and development centre.

The need for a hybrid solution
Facing increasing expenses as it grew globally, Oriflame’s infrastructure was becoming more costly to operate and upgrade. Also, individual applications required additional capacity and power for their servers. So, Oriflame asked our subsidiary in Czech to develop a solution, responded by outsourcing its entire IT infrastructure and implementing a hybrid cloud option.

The solution included the deployment and operation of internal IT systems (eg. accounting systems, data warehouses, business intelligence, etc.) as well as infrastructure. It also provided a platform for physical as well as virtual servers for more than 50 local websites including the portal for Oriflame consultants. As a result, all 350 Oriflame virtual servers migrated to the T-Mobile Czech hybrid cloud and 9 racks to its data center.

“What we appreciate most about the solution is the deployment of our systems in the cloud environment, meaning all of our corporate applications are easily available to our employees and consultants,” Richard Hamrik, Managing Director IT Centre of Excellence for Oriflame. “It enables us to flexibly react to market demands in any part of the world and improving our customer services.”

But when is a hybrid cloud solution the optimal choice for a company?
The public cloud offers agility, flexibility and speed to market that can perform significantly better than internally delivered services in many organisations. However, many companies realize that public cloud infrastructure isn’t the answer to all of their IT needs. It can take considerable time and expense to move legacy operations to a new environment. But a hybrid model combining local public and private cloud solutions often provides the best of both worlds.

It allows for companies with global operations to tap the power of the public cloud while keeping sensitive data or business-critical functions on a directly connected private network. And by outsourcing infrastructure, organizations no longer have to worry about hardware, having more time to concentrate on what’s really important to their businesses.

Ready to go hybrid? Let Deutsche Telekom develop a cloud solution tailored to your needs.