Client story Tailored Brands Cuts Costs 40% With Google Cloud Migration and Insight

Modernizing infrastructure for a world-class shopping experience

Tailored Brands, the leading omnichannel retailer behind Men’s Wearhouse, Jos. A. Bank, and other great brands, set a goal to modernize their IT infrastructure and give customers a world-class shopping experience. To meet this, the company needed to solve major challenges with their legacy data center.

Collaborating with Insight, Tailored Brands migrated their critical workloads to Google Cloud, building a foundation for continuous improvement and innovation.

The challenge

Tailored Brands faced a major need to modernize their infrastructure, which a legacy data center could not support. The company ran into four obstacles:

• Capacity hit a wall: The existing facility, a co-location center in Dallas, reached 100% of its maximum capacity for both power and physical space. This meant the company had no room to expand or add new workloads, stopping growth.
• Expensive hardware upgrades: About 60% of the existing infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking equipment, had to be replaced within two years. A costly hardware refresh in a building with no capacity was not an option.
• Inability to meet business demands. The company’s omnichannel business units needed to modernize, shorten the time it takes to get new services to market, and have a system that let them fail fast. There was also growing demand to use modern platforms like Kubernetes.
• Poor disaster recovery options. Tailored Brands’ existing setup did not give them a true Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) capability. Tailored Brands wanted to strengthen their BCDR plan.

Facing these challenges, Tailored Brands needed to decide: spend money modernizing the current data center or move to the cloud. “We wanted to provide a world-class experience to our customers,” says Rajesh Gajula, senior director of infrastructure and operations at Tailored Brands. “That means we don’t ever want our tech to go down, especially if it’s customer-facing, as this impacts our brand reputation.”

The solution

Tailored Brands chose to migrate to the cloud with Insight, a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, picking a phased approach: lift, shift, modernize. The key goal was to create a staging area for existing virtual machines (VMs) before moving some of them to cloud-native apps.

Staging and disaster recovery on Google Cloud VMware Engine

Tailored Brands and Insight chose Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) to act as the intermediate staging area for workloads from the decommissioned data center. GCVE solved two main challenges:

• Workload hosting: It took over all the workloads from the data center.
• Disaster recovery: It instantly became the disaster recovery (DR) site for the company’s main Houston data center.

Migrating with speed and low risk

To meet the aggressive timeline — driven by the looming hardware end-of-life — Insight used the VMware HCX tool for the migration. This tool simplified the migration of hundreds of VMs and made the process much easier than doing it manually.

Facing large storage needs

The team faced a challenge with large storage needs, including centralized storage, home drives, and network shares for all departments. Insight brought in NetApp^® storage to help fill this gap. The NetApp storage solution worked perfectly, fitting seamlessly within the Google Cloud environment alongside GCVE, which let Tailored Brands keep using shared drives and network shares.

Collaborating on a detailed plan

Insight’s process was built on detailed pre-planning:

• Assessment: The project started with an infrastructure assessment to give a complete view of what hardware was supported. This analysis, which showed that refreshing hardware was more costly than migrating, convinced Tailored Brands’ executive team to go forward.
• Phased approach: The teams thoroughly analyzed the data and sorted the VMs into waves, carefully planning each move to eliminate or minimize workload outages.
• Division of labor: Insight set up the foundational technology, migration tools, and connection between the data center and the cloud. The Tailored Brands team focused on the workloads, figuring out the migration waves, and completing User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

“Insight’s migration planning minimized disruption and made moving VMs very efficient,” says Gajula. “Before we ever touched a VM, Insight spent time with us analyzing the VM data, taking us through a mapping exercise, and figuring out the migration waves and which VMs are in wave one, wave two, etc. As a result, we were able to migrate VMs without affecting the workloads.”

The outcome

Tailored Brands’ migration to GCVE gave them immediate, significant benefits that let the company drive their long-term modernization goals.

Quantifiable benefits

• Cost savings: Tailored Brands cut costs 40% by moving from a capital expenditure model, where they bought and owned hardware, to an operational expenditure subscription model in the cloud.
• On time: The project finished on time, which kept other digital transformation projects on schedule.
• Efficiency: The company no longer needs to keep or manage hardware, patching, or licensing for part of their environment. Google Cloud manages this as a service, freeing up the Tailored Brands team to focus on more value-added actions.

Qualitative improvements

• Better resilience: The move created a better BCDR plan for the business. The Tailored Brands team successfully ran multiple DR tests between their primary data center and GCVE, which functions as the DR site.
• Simplified operations: Keeping the same IP addresses, application URLs, and network for the migrated workloads made the move a relatively light lift for the application teams. They never saw any difference from before to after the migration, which prevented disruption of their daily work.
• Freedom to innovate: Tailored Brands’ IT team gained more time for creative solutions. Instead of patching and maintaining infrastructure, they now focus on innovation and important projects.

Future outlook

Their new Google Cloud environment lets Tailored Brands scale more easily. For peak retail seasons like Black Friday, the company can use Google Cloud’s auto-scaling features and services (e.g., GKE, GCE, GCVE) to grow compute capacity as needed. They no longer wait for hardware to ship or write purchase orders, accelerating time to value.

The migration process also created a clear template for future moves. Tailored Brands can now move VMs between their primary data center and GCVE as business needs change.