Boosting IT Efficiency: How Croma’s Cloud Migration Cut Costs

When a retail chain grows fast, its technology often struggles to keep pace. Stores multiply, staff numbers rise, and the systems quietly running in the background, like email, start to creak under the load. Infiniti Retail, the Tata Group company behind the consumer electronics chain Croma, faced exactly this situation. Its email backbone was built on an ageing on-premise server, and the business had outgrown it. The decision the company made next, moving to a cloud-based email platform, cut its total cost of ownership by roughly 30 percent and offers a clear lesson in how modern retailers can rethink IT infrastructure. Let us walk through what happened and why it matters.

The business needs of a growing retail chain 🔗

Infiniti Retail runs Croma, a multi-brand electronics retailer that is a subsidiary of the Tata Group and was launched in 2006 as one of the country’s first large-format specialist chains for consumer electronics and durables. At the time of this case, the company operated 64 stores spread across the country, offered more than 2,500 products, and employed around 2,700 people, of whom roughly 700 needed email access.

The problem sat in the engine room. The company’s email was running on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, an on-premise system installed years earlier. Three issues had piled up. First, hardware support for that generation of servers had ended, which meant any failure carried real risk. Second, backups were tape-based, a method that is slow, manual, and prone to failure exactly when you need it most. Third, and perhaps most frustrating for a chain opening new stores, creating fresh email IDs was difficult because the system simply did not scale easily. Every new hire who needed an email account became a small IT project.

Why email infrastructure is a strategic concern 🔗

It is tempting to treat email as a minor utility, but for a retail chain it is the connective tissue between head office, store managers, vendors, and support teams. When the underlying system is fragile, the whole organisation feels the friction. This is why the choice of email infrastructure is genuinely a business decision and not just a technical one. The retail sector has been moving steadily toward cloud-based systems precisely because they free internal teams from infrastructure babysitting, allowing them to redirect energy toward customer-facing innovation rather than maintenance.

Evaluating the options and choosing the cloud 🔗

Infiniti Retail did not jump straight to a solution. The team evaluated three broad approaches: keeping email on-premise with new hardware, moving to a hosted arrangement managed by a third party, and shifting fully to a cloud service. After weighing the trade-offs, the company chose Microsoft Exchange Online, delivered as part of the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, the predecessor to what is now Microsoft 365.

The deciding factor was a proof of concept. Rather than trusting a sales pitch, the company tested the platform first. According to Nadeem Malim, then Senior Manager for IT, the trial demonstrated three things clearly: lower costs, greater agility in responding to business needs, and consistency across all locations. Running a small-scale test before a full commitment is a sound practice, because it surfaces problems early and builds internal confidence in the change.

The role of a deployment partner 🔗

Large migrations rarely succeed on enthusiasm alone. Infiniti Retail partnered with Microland, a technology services firm, to handle deployment. With that expertise on board, the company migrated all 700 email users in just 60 days. A clean migration timeline like this matters because it limits the period during which staff have to deal with disruption, and it signals that the project was planned rather than improvised.

What changed for users and IT staff 🔗

For everyday users, the shift was smooth. Employees continued to access their email, calendars, and task management through familiar tools, namely Outlook 2007 and 2010 on the desktop, or Outlook Web App through a browser. Because the interface stayed familiar, the change did not demand heavy retraining, which is often where migrations stumble.

For the IT team, the difference was more dramatic. Creating bulk email IDs that once took days could now be done in minutes, with no need to worry about running out of storage. This directly solved one of the original pain points. Exchange Online is designed to give users anywhere access to email, calendar, and contacts across browsers and devices, with automatic patching that removes the chore of maintaining the system manually.

Goodbye to fragile backups 🔗

One of the quietest but most valuable changes involved data safety. Instead of relying on tape backups, mailbox data is now continuously replicated to Microsoft data centres in geographically distributed locations. This effectively eliminated the company’s backup operations as a separate task. As a cloud-based messaging platform, Exchange Online keeps copies of data across multiple sites, so a failure at any single location does not threaten the company’s email records. For a business that previously depended on physical tapes, this is a meaningful upgrade in resilience.

Reducing total cost of ownership 🔗

Total cost of ownership, usually shortened to TCO, is the full cost of running a system across its entire life, not just the sticker price. It includes hardware, software licences, electricity, staff time, backups, disaster recovery, and upgrades. When you add all of this up, on-premise systems often cost far more than they first appear.

Avijit Mitra, the company’s CFO, estimated that the move to Exchange Online reduced TCO by 25 to 30 percent. The savings came from eliminating several cost categories at once: there were no more email servers to buy and replace, no backup infrastructure to maintain, no separate disaster recovery setup, and no periodic software upgrades to fund. Instead, the company pays a predictable monthly fee, and Microsoft handles all the maintenance behind it.

This figure is not unusual for cloud migrations. Research cited in industry analyses has found that moving workloads to the public cloud can deliver TCO savings of 30 to 40 percent, partly because it converts large upfront capital expenditure into smaller, ongoing operating expenditure. There was a labour benefit too. By handing server management to the provider, Croma’s IT team saved an estimated 25 to 30 hours of system administration work every month, hours that could now go toward more useful projects.

The hidden value of freed-up time 🔗

The 25 to 30 hours saved each month deserve a closer look, because the real benefit of cloud adoption is often this kind of reclaimed capacity rather than the headline cost figure. When companies delegate hardware and software management to a cloud provider, they can redirect their people toward strategic work. An IT team no longer spending its days patching servers and swapping backup tapes can instead focus on improving store systems, supporting new locations, or strengthening security. That redirected effort is genuine value, even though it does not show up neatly on an invoice.

Productivity gains and future possibilities 🔗

Beyond cost, the migration improved how people worked. Seamless access to email, calendars, contacts, and business documents across devices made the workforce more efficient. A store manager could check a calendar invite on the move, and a head-office team could coordinate schedules without the friction of an unreliable system. Integrated calendaring lets employees schedule meetings, set reminders, and share their availability, which speeds up planning and avoids double-bookings.

The company also began evaluating Office Live Meeting capabilities for virtual meetings. The idea was to connect project teams, the Operations function, and even HR interviews across locations without everyone having to travel. For a chain with stores scattered across many cities, this carried an obvious promise: fewer flights and train journeys, lower travel expenses, and faster decisions. Online meeting tools have since become standard across business, but it is worth noting that Croma was already thinking in this direction at the time.

A template for retail IT modernisation 🔗

What makes this case useful is not the specific product chosen but the pattern behind the decision. The company identified a clear pain point, evaluated multiple options instead of defaulting to the familiar one, tested through a proof of concept, partnered with experts for deployment, and measured the outcome in concrete terms. Other retailers can follow the same sequence. A sensible approach is often phased: start with lower-risk systems and build confidence before moving the most critical ones, an idea echoed in guidance that recommends a phased approach to reduce risk during cloud adoption. Email, sitting somewhat apart from core sales systems, is frequently a natural first step on that journey.

What do you think? If you were advising a retail chain still running an ageing on-premise system, which benefit would you put first in your case for change: the direct cost savings, the improved reliability, or the time your IT team would reclaim for strategic work? And where would you draw the line on which systems are worth moving to the cloud and which are safer to keep in-house?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crom%C4%81
2. https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/blog/cloud-computing-retail
3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/exchange-online
4. https://petri.com/exchange-online/
5. https://www.cloudzero.com/blog/cloud-computing-statistics/
6. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/smb/cloud-benefits-from-total-to-true-cost-of-ownership/
7. https://oryon.net/blog/microsoft-365-business-basic/