Many companies are now challenged to restructure their digital infrastructure to meet new consumer data privacy regulations. China now requires that their customer data remains located in-country. This article will discuss how iSoftStone architected solutions for our global clients’ Content Services to address necessary infrastructure changes within a rapid time frame.
Case Study
Our client is a global retail brand who sells their product in 170 countries worldwide. Their eCommerce and Mobile Apps are available worldwide. Currently the data from these ecommerce shops are stored on their Global US cloud servers. As changing privacy policies emerge throughout the world, this current centralized data storage framework will not comply with new personal data regulations. Our client needed to replicate all related customer data storage to an in-country facility by July 2022 to be compliant. Not meeting the required deadline would impact millions of customers and a possible loss of 18% revenue. iSoftStone was selected to manage rebuilding their content services backend infrastructure. iSoftStone’s one-stop solutions, experienced resources, in-depth industry knowledge, global retail experience, and mature methodologies made them an idea partner to implement this project.
After assessing the eCommerce applications that would be impacted, the team found that over 12,000 services and 80+ teams would be impacted. After the services were identified, iSoftStone and client SMEs began the discovery work to define and architect rebuilding essential backend services to usher published content into China and store any consumer data within the country. It was decided that the project would be managed in several phases. The first phase will target their most popular eCommerce mobile App to stay live when the regulatory deadline hit in July of 2022. Additional consumer channels will be decommissioned and addressed in the later phases at the end of 2022.
The eCommerce App Alpha release will address 70+ prioritized features deemed necessary for a frictionless consumer journey. They identified personal data that was captured or stored outside of China. iSoftStone staffed 3 of the 80+ teams chosen for the ECM replication project, leading the charge building out the cloud infrastructure, services, and monitoring of published content.
iSoftStone created and managed three teams to design, implement, and support customer, product, social, blog, and merchandise content. Teams consisted of Architects, DevOps, Backend Engineers, and Technical Project and Product Managers. Using their knowledge with fast onboarding, requirements gathering and the use of Agile methods (oversite within Scrum processes), the team began providing and implementing solutions.
With an aggressive timeline, the team worked with both Global and their Chinese counterparts to hit strategic milestones ensuring the project stayed on track by the July deadline imposed by the Chinese government. The Alpha project’s January-to-July timeline also included: product support, integration support, bug fixes, refactoring data hydration, site reliability overhead, observability and monitoring, and go live preparation.
The following diagram is a high-level representation of the content ecosystem that feeds content to the eCommerce App. The architecture funneled all Greater China published content from Global datacenters to data centers located in China. Therefore, the required data will reside exclusively in China to meet the regulatory requirements.
The architecture of the described content service is depicted below:
The project is now in its final stages of testing and will go live in July to meet the scope and legal requirements of the project.
Migrating content publishing services to meet a challenging timeline and working with many teams to ensure that the entire project was in sync with all the moving pieces takes an experienced management and technical team. Working on this project, communication between teams was imperative. iSoftStone ensured that they kept lines of communication open with all teams through daily, weekly, and monthly alignment meetings. For a complex project like this to be successful, onboarding high-quality senior resources and having a strong management team are imperative.
If you would like to learn more about iSoftStone’s Content Services practice, please leave us a note on our Contact page.
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