What: As retailers continue their journey down the digital transformation path, they are on a constant strive to be agile in how they respond to ever-evolving customer requirements. One of those retailers being Neiman Marcus Group.

Why it is important: With customer expectations and technology evolving at an unprecedented pace, moving to cloud is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have for retail companies in terms of operational resilience, reliability, security, scalability, and agility.

The process of migrating a monolithic application into microservices requires modernizing legacy systems. To accomplish this, NMG incrementally refactored monolithic applications, instead of refactoring the entire code at the same time.

NMG built a Cloud Center of Excellence team, responsible for the complete DevSecOps practice across the organization. They are responsible for setting up the cloud build pipelines, guard rails, governance, platform architecture & security standards, so that different product teams have a certain baseline and are still within those guard rails, can operate really fast and execute scalable and standard performance tested architectures.

Even though NMG started operating in the cloud, they needed to have certain enterprise guidelines, best practices and architectural standards in place. So, they built a solid platform that different product teams can innovate at scale and quickly deliver value to business partners. Serverless architecture also helped NMG elastically scale their app to quickly meet demand.

Some of the rewards for Neiman Marcus Group felt from building their serverless platform were accelerated business agility and speed to market, an increase in online customer satisfaction, and a major uptick in associate productivity as they were given a platform where they have the information and the intelligence needed to engage the customers effectively and efficiently.

Cloud-Native Architecture Transforming Retail: Lessons from Neiman Marcus Group