Estate assessment
An inventory of databases, versions, sizes and dependencies, with the applications each one supports.
Industry context
Database solutions in retail and e-commerce
We design and migrate database platforms so transaction systems stay available and recoverable, with every move tested before it happens in production.
Database work covers the engines that hold your transaction data: high availability, backup and recovery, performance and migration between platforms. We assess the current estate, design the target topology and move workloads in planned windows with a tested rollback.
Retailers trade on thin margins, with peaks around Ramadan, Eid and White Friday and customers who move between app, website and store in a single purchase. Merchandising, store operations and digital teams each own part of that journey, so we plan changes around the trading calendar. Data residency rules often decide where a database may run and where its backups may go, such as data classification policies for government and regulated data in the UAE and the NCA Cloud Cybersecurity Controls in Saudi Arabia.
We hand over with runbooks and training, and can stay on under agreed service levels.
Alongside sector regulation, we often map delivery evidence to cross-industry baselines such as the UAE Information Assurance Regulation issued by TDRA, the NCA Essential Cybersecurity Controls in Saudi Arabia and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which many risk reviewers already use.
How the work is organised
From design to stable operation, with the evidence commercial leadership, finance and the privacy office ask for.
Availability and recovery
Replication, backup and restore designed against agreed recovery targets, and tested by restoring real data.
Migration and tuning
Schema and data migration rehearsed on a copy of production, followed by query and index tuning under realistic load.
Consumer and data rules
We design consent, returns and customer data handling around consumer protection rules and personal data law in each market, such as the UAE PDPL and the Saudi PDPL, with ZATCA e-invoicing requirements where Saudi sales are in scope.
Security and encryption
Encryption at rest and in transit, key management and access reviews for administrators.
Operations handover
Monitoring, patching and restore runbooks handed to your database team with training.
Checks before you start
A database programme is ready to start when the applications on each database and their recovery needs are known.
- Privacy has decided the consent model for customer data.
- Application owners have agreed the recovery targets and maintenance windows for each database.
- Security and compliance have agreed where data and backups may be hosted.
Plan database solutions in retail and e-commerce
Share your current systems, compliance themes and timeline. We will return a phased plan, a staffing model and a risk register for your stakeholders to review.