{"id":85895,"date":"2023-01-17T15:41:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T15:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/?p=4023858"},"modified":"2023-01-17T15:41:27","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T15:41:27","slug":"nrf-2023-neiman-marcus-offer-tips-for-transition-to-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=85895","title":{"rendered":"NRF 2023: Neiman Marcus offer tips for transition to the cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cloud
Image: Thitichaya\/Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Executives from Neiman Marcus and AWS sat down at retail event NRF 2023<\/a> in New York City to talk about the luxury clothing retailer\u2019s cloud journey and commit to a five-year deal with large-scale AWS services.<\/p>\n

Two of the largest cloud providers attending NRF this weekend \u2014 AWS and Google Cloud<\/a> \u2014 both noted an overall trend in organizations moving from a \u201clift and shift\u201d transitional model to overall \u201ctransformation\u201d as they engage more closely and at a larger scale with a cloud provider.<\/p>\n

SEE: <\/strong>Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer<\/strong><\/a> (TechRepublic Premium)<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Neiman Marcus, Vijay Karthik, CTO and senior vice president, was hired to tend this transition. He started in 2016 with just a couple of servers for mobile use. In the course of choosing a platform-as-a-service provider, he explored \u201clift, rearchitect, replatform and reboost\u201d \u2014 starting in small chunks with programming done for the cloud from the ground up.<\/p>\n

That required teaching programming teams to think cloud-first. Regardless of which cloud provider an organization chooses, they\u2019ll have to consider how to rearrange tech teams, pace the change and keep up momentum during the transition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe teams need to be agile and the pace of innovation needs to be rapid,\u201d said Sriram Vaidyanathan, vice president of omnichannel development and engineering at Neiman Marcus. \u201cPick the right tool for the right workload. We had to graduate to our level and be cloud native.\u201d<\/p>\n

Figuring out what the engineering teams would look like also involved getting input from e-commerce stakeholders, site merchants, and the Neiman Marcus digital and customer strategy team. As with any large transformation, executive buy-in<\/a> was key.<\/p>\n

Operational efficiencies come when you are cloud native, not cloud agnostic, Karthik said. The transition period from 2017 to 2021 \u2014 at which point Neiman Marcus entered into a five-year deal with AWS \u2014 taught them how to go farther.<\/p>\n

Jump to:<\/p>\n

Building a cloud team<\/h2>\n

Many people in retail will say customer needs are the top priority. When it comes to the cloud, Vaidyanathan said evolving and iterating on the way Neiman Marcus works with the cloud is part of building platforms and experiences that really meet customer needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo actually put this in place you need to have the right foundation,\u201d he said. \u201cYou need to have the right foundational team to be the custodians of the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n