Blog From data center to cloud: Charting the retail digital transformation with Google Cloud and Insight
By Insight Editor / 31 Oct 2025 / Topics: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Modern infrastructure Cloud
Retail is shifting. Customers expect seamless, personalized experiences, and the pressure for operational efficiency is high. Digital transformation is no longer optional—it’s a matter of survival. Retail leaders have seen the digital future: it’s the flexible, powerful infrastructure of the cloud and a move away from the limits of on-premises data centers. As a retailer making this move, the platform you choose and the solution provider you work with will determine your success. Retail digital transformation with Google Cloud provides the scalability and innovation retailers need, and Insight, an Insight company, gives you the deep, retail-specific expertise to move you to the cloud.
Retailer challenges with yesterday’s IT infrastructure
The limits of legacy IT are no longer theoretical; they are directly costing your business time and revenue. For retailers navigating today’s market, yesterday’s infrastructure is creating critical obstacles.
Constraints of aging infrastructure
For many, the cost of maintaining an on-premises data center is a drag on the bottom line. This was the exact challenge facing FTD, the original flower delivery network, whose aging infrastructure was causing instability and quickly nearing its end-of-life. Northgate Market also realized that new hardware would require a large capital expense, extra storage capacity, and lock them into support contracts and data center management.
The need to cut capital costs and technical debt is driving the retail industry toward the cloud.
Data bottlenecks and lack of insight
Data is gold in the competitive retail world, but that gold is often locked away. Frasers Group, a global retail powerhouse, struggled with a mixed technology stack that created a significant data bottleneck. Their customer and product teams couldn’t access usable analytics, leaving them unable to truly know the customer.
Without a modern data foundation, strategic decisions become guesswork. Analytics shouldn’t just be for data engineers; it needs to be in the hands of the decision makers.
Scalability and agility limits
The peaks of retail buying, whether holiday seasons or unexpected viral demand, show the limits of fixed on-premises infrastructure. Before their migration, FTD had a ceiling on their transaction capacity. Similarly, the luxury resale platform Tradesy realized they needed to modernize and standardize their IT infrastructure for growth and the ability to scale rapidly.
Retailers need virtually unlimited, on-demand infrastructure. With on-premises retail infrastructure, too little capacity means operations slow to a crawl or crashing entirely. Too much on-premises infrastructure also poses risks: you pay for unused capacity, and you create a larger attack surface for hackers.
The Google Cloud solution with Insight’s expert guidance
Migrating to Google Cloud helps solve these problems with its elastic infrastructure, advanced analytics, and collaborative solutions. However, the complexity of migration, especially for a retail business, demands a solution provider with the right expertise. Insight brings a proven record of fast-tracking digital transformation for leading retailers.
Infrastructure modernization and migration
Insight’s methodology centers on an expert-led, phased migration that prioritizes minimal disruption and strategic cleanup.
FTD’s VM migration: Insight guided FTD through a 29-week migration to Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE). Crucially, Insight’s project approach equipped FTD’s team to do the final waves of migration on their own, improving their expertise. This collaboration was key to moving hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) and critical databases (e.g., SQL, MySQL) while making the infrastructure more resilient.
Northgate Market’s data center exit: Insight used advanced cloud management, monitoring, and analysis tools to perform a detailed discovery and right-sizing of Northgate Market’s VMs and applications before the migration. This deep analysis confirmed the migration plan and helped Northgate cut their servers from over 500 to just 150, helping ensure an efficient transition.
Cloud-native data and analytics
Insight can help retailers establish a robust, future-proof cloud and data foundation built on Google Cloud’s leading analytics tools.
Unlocking customer insight: Insight helped Northgate Market build a data lake on BigQuery, Google Cloud’s petabyte-scale data warehouse, letting them consolidate eight years of structured and unstructured transaction data. This gave them the capacity and power to analyze all their data, revealing actionable business intelligence that changed their view of customer relevance.
Self-service analytics: For Frasers Group, Insight focused on building the cloud and data foundation as the first step toward implementing a much-needed self-service data analytics solution for their non-technical product and marketing teams, clearing a major organizational bottleneck.
Proven results: qualitative and quantitative outcomes
The impact of a Insight-led Google Cloud migration leads directly to measurable business results for retailers.
Cost cutting and cost avoidance
FTD avoided over $1 million in hardware costs and cut millions annually in facility operating costs by vacating their headquarters’ data center.
Northgate Market estimates $300,000 in annual savings over their previous data center model, plus avoiding up to $1.8 million in new hardware costs.
Tradesy cut costs 40% by migrating their infrastructure from a competitor’s cloud to Google Cloud.
Performance and resilience
FTD’s new GCVE environment supports more than twice the transaction volume compared to their on-prem setup during peak seasons, significantly improving ROI.
Northgate Market minimized latency problems and saw a big dip in infrastructure alerts after migrating to Google Cloud.
Operational efficiency and easing integration
FTD was able to shut down 310 of 700 VMs, cutting over 40% of their VM sprawl, a massive cleanup made possible by Insight’s discovery approach.
Tradesy no longer has to manage infrastructure, freeing up their team to focus on delivering value to users and supporting over $1 billion in seller revenue.
Insight showed Northgate associates how to use Google Cloud as a tool to do their jobs better, rather than fearing replacement, which eased integration of the new platform into the team’s workflow.
Insight: your proven retail solution provider
Moving to Google Cloud is a powerful strategic decision, offering great agility, scalability, and access to industry-leading AI and data capabilities. The transition itself is where the relationship with Insight is critical.
Insight’s expertise is not only in moving data but also reimagining your retail operations for Google Cloud. We have a deeply flexible and collaborative approach, a deep commitment to delivery, and a record of driving real cost savings and business effectiveness for retail leaders like Frasers Group, FTD, Northgate Market, and Tradesy. “Insight was very deliberate in showing us everything and how it worked,” says Harrison Lewis, former Chief Information and Privacy Officer at Northgate Market. “They made sure we understood how to do it ourselves.”
Choosing Insight means working with a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, giving you the highest level of technical know-how and strategic guidance.
Don’t let old infrastructure dictate your future. Take the next step in your digital transformation.
Ready to build a resilient, data-driven retail future? Contact Insight today.
