Rapid growth in our refund issuing business led to a capacity issue with our existing infrastructure. Our ability to scale rapidly in our own on-premise environment was limited by data centre space constraints. The Business Intelligence (BI) system was identified as the only non-revenue system that would free up capacity, and so it was shut down to protect the revenue systems.

The initial engineering estimates for building a new BI infrastructure were so high, that there was a real danger of losing the BI capability. I challenged the BI team to use a cloud service provider as a way of staying in business without dependency on our limited internal resources. We evaluated a number of options and chose AWS as our cloud platform.

As we were successful with moving BI to the AWS cloud, we decided to make it a permanent move, and created a Reporting Factory to handle our Merchant Reporting, management dashboards, and other scheduled reporting tasks. These tasks are classic peak computing applications - high resource utilisation for short periods of time - and lend themselves to the cloud environment. The BI Reporting Factory is running on AWS and is accessed by all the 38 locations worldwide. We are also hosting our corporate website, customer-facing websites, and our media content management systems on AWS.