How Kohl’s Freed Themselves from Free Microsoft DNS

Company Profile

As one of America’s largest retail department store chains, Kohl’s manages a massive number of IP addresses. With over 1,100 retail stores, nine brick and mortar distribution centers and five online fulfilment centers, Kohl’s relies heavily on a scalable network infrastructure to meet their diverse and growing IT demands.

Before BlueCat…

Kohl’s was hampered by Microsoft DNS and manual IP address management.

“Any DNS issue would impact absolutely everything”, says Kohl’s Senior Network Engineer. “It was an unorganized mess.”

With Microsoft DNS, Kohl’s struggled with unwieldy spreadsheets to manually manage thousands of IP addresses and contended with a woeful lack of visibility into their infrastructure. Management wasn’t centralized. Processes weren’t automated. Human errors were common. Productivity suffered. Too much time and too many resources were spent maintaining functionality and managing issues. Scaling the network was virtually impossible.

Simply put, Kohl’s infrastructure was just not adequate to support current IT needs – nor was it a solid foundation for growth initiatives. With so many red flags, they knew it was time to find a solution that was able to meet the current and future demands of their enterprise.

After BlueCat…

After migrating to a centrally managed and automated network management platform, “a huge weight was lifted.” Kohl’s’ previous DNS issues became a thing of the past. Now, with a centralized view of their network, automated processes and address management, Kohl’s is able to easily provision a server in minutes. They no longer waste time with cumbersome updates and manual IP management. Thanks to the automated IPAM, they now make quick, universal, real-time changes. Plus, the entire migration process was quick and easy, taking just under a couple of weeks.

“A big part of the reason we’ve been so successful is BlueCat’s support. It is second to none.”

Kohl’s is saving a significant time and resources since transitioning to an automated DNS solution. The team has full visibility into the network and complete control of all assets.

What’s more, having dispensed with the Windows environment means that Kohl’s is now able to schedule deployments hourly – not weekly.

What does the future look like?

Kohl’s is integrating innovative APIs to better handle IT requests across the enterprise, and are knee deep in implementing virtualization. With scalable network infrastructure now in place, their plans for cloud computing strategy are unfolding.

What Kohl’s needed was a dependable network infrastructure they could rely on and grow with – and that’s exactly what they got.

“Rock solid dependable… I have nothing but praise for BlueCat’s implementation team and support staff.”