With the business operating 24 hours, seven days a week, a high uptime of SAP and other key applications is integral to smooth operations and a superior customer experience. An interruption of just two hours can compromise important activities such as invoicing and sales. An Active/Active Palo Alto firewall configuration helps deliver 99.99% availability uptime for production workloads, while cloud-based disaster recovery accelerates failover by 50% while reducing costs by 80%.

The firewall configuration combined with Google AI for Security also provides powerful protection against what Suraj Perera, CIO Teejay Group, describes as a "fast evolving threat landscape." "With Google Cloud, we can trust that this is taken care of, rather than having to invest in security tools and ensure upgrades are completed," he explains.

Meanwhile, transitioning from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud enables Teejay to execute plans to expand into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond, without locating data center equipment and IT personnel in each market. This enables the business to control IT headcount and infrastructure expenditure in its expansion phase, while managing its cloud environment from a central console to minimize demands on IT team members.

Not only is Teejay managing potential growth cost-effectively, but infrastructure optimization and the use of shared Virtual Private Cloud have reduced the organization's infrastructure costs by 30%. That's because, in simple terms, the business has moved away from buying its own computer equipment upfront, based on peak workload expectations, and now rents it as a pay-as-you-go service instead.

Considerable productivity benefits complement these financial outcomes, with the organization's IT team able to focus on projects that deliver business value rather than infrastructure maintenance. The function is already examining how to use AI and data to better leverage its human expertise in areas such as colour mixing and fabric texture, and reduce waste across various processes.

"With SAP on Google Cloud, we are well positioned to execute our plans to grow into new markets," concludes Suraj Perera, CIO Teejay Group. "The biggest benefit is the comfort we have knowing that a business of the caliber of Google Cloud is looking after back-end infrastructure, such as storage and networking, while we focus on becoming the preferred fabric provider for brands worldwide."