Gift Card Information Vault (GIV) Implementation

Executive Summary

Neiman Marcus is on a mission to utilize technology to create better e-commerce experiences and more loyal customers. The legacy Neiman Gift Card application was replaced with a Third-Party application (First Data/Transaction Wireless aka Gift Card Solutions). Gift Card Solutions (GCS), was the only source that issued, activated, and controlled redemptions on behalf of Neiman Marcus. This was also the financial system of record for all Gift Cards issued by Neiman Marcus. Since the GCS application introduced did not solve all of the business challenges, a new application was needed.

Objectives

The key objectives of the solution implemented are • Design a Micro-services Serverless Architecture for the implementation • Implement CI/CD pipeline for automated testing and deployment • Develop a highly available, secure and scalable solution • Process ETL jobs by designing a cost effective solution • Address the business challenges with Gift Card Solutions (GCS)

Solution Architecture

Neiman Marcus is focused on continuously innovating and improving customer experiences, and Amazon API Gateway enabled them to rapidly develop, deploy, update, and scale API endpoints to enhance and orchestrate customer experiences. The below infrastructure was deployed utilizing AWS Cloud formation template service.

About Neiman Marcus Group

Neiman Marcus Group, Inc., originally Neiman-Marcus, is an American chain of luxury department stores owned by the Neiman Marcus Group, headquartered in Dallas, Texas.

Company Overview

Four luxury retailers — Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Last Call and Horchow — make up the Neiman Marcus Group.

For over a century, they have continually transformed and elevated the luxury shopping experience, offering the finest in fashion, shoes, handbags, jewelry, beauty and decorative items for the home.

In addition to their websites and catalogs, they have 43 Neiman Marcus stores across the United States, two Bergdorf Goodman stores in Manhattan and 22 Last Call locations.

Why is Neiman Marcus Group working with BizCloud Experts

BizCloud Experts is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Consulting Partner with multiple AWS Service Delivery designations and has been named amongst the 10 most competent Amazon Web Service Providers of 2019. Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), is a team of people responsible for developing the cloud best practices, governance, and frameworks that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform their business using the cloud. We have been an integral part of an AWS CCOE team at Neiman Marcus since its inception. In that capacity we helped their internal product teams perform architecture reviews, develop best practices, comply with governance, and build frameworks the rest of the organization can leverage to transform their business using AWS. We developed a strategy that did the following:

• Immediate analysis of existing production systems • Designed secure, highly available Serverless Architecture • Developed reusable Infrastructure as Code scripts

The end-result was that BizCloud Experts provided required application and infrastructure support. An AWS based application was designed to be scalable, highly-available and cost-effective using services like S3, API Gateway, Lambda, RDS, Glue etc. The most important part of the implementation on AWS was the successful without any downtime. BizCloud Experts are now moving to a No-Ops Continuous Delivery Model.

Implementation Description

The infrastructure consists of following:

• React based application is hosted on S3, served using CloudFront distribution and Route 53. WAF is implemented to secure access.

• Authentication is handled by AWS Cognito which is integrated with Okta identity provider.

• Dynamic APIs are implemented using API gateway and Lambda with token based access using a custom authorizer.

• Database is provisioned as Amazon RDS Aurora MySQL. • Security is enforced by launching the Lambda functions and database

inside a VPC and private subnet. Access is allowed only through security groups.

• ETL jobs are configured and run utilizing AWS Glue.

Loyalty programs account for big portion of Neiman Marcus revenue and Gift card is a major component of it. API Gateway is designed to scale to 100 million plus transactions a year, configured to handle concurrent API calls, provide features like traffic management, CORS support, throttling, monitoring while securing millions of Gift card transactions. BizCloud Experts helped Neiman Marcus build RESTful/WebSocket API’s that enable real time 2-way communication applications.

About BizCloud Experts

BizCloud Experts is recognized as a leader in developing solutions using Serverless computing technologies, and automating IT services. We innovate, transform and seamlessly blend digital and physical platforms. To learn more, visit our site, follow us on Facebook, Linked-In,Twitter, call us @+1 (214) 206 8976 or email sales@bizcloudexperts.com.

Results

• Achieved 100% of application availability

• Over 99% application deployment success rate

• Ease of adding new features for development teams

• Application was developed and maintained in a cost-effective way

• Ease of application usage for consumers with zero-downtime

AWS Services

• Amazon API Gateway • Amazon Route53 • AWS WAF (Web Application

Firewall) • Amazon CloudFront • Amazon S3 • Amazon Cognito • AWS Lambda • Amazon RDS – Aurora

MySQL