Scalable Flexibility Crafted for Cricut Using AWS Cloud

With over 6.4 million users worldwide, Cricut, Inc. is a household name for crafters. Their creative technology platform inspires members to continuously imagine at-home crafts. Cricut’s mission is to unleash the creative potential of its members with innovations that bring ideas to life in the form of professional, personalized handmade projects. In addition to Cricut’s core offerings, the brand fosters a thriving community of millions of dedicated members.

The Challenge

Cricut and Avvale first worked together when Cricut selected CloudEndure Disaster Recovery (DR), which reduces downtime and data loss by providing fast and reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cricut backed up their entire data backup in the cloud without having to invest in a data center. After the DR implementation, Cricut understood and experienced first hand the benefits of having their entire database housed in the cloud. A year after implementation, they began to explore the possibility of migrating all their SAP workloads into AWS Cloud and ultimately asked Avvale to partner once again to steer them towards digital transformation.

The Approach

While Cricut has been using SAP installations since 2009 with little change, their business has substantially changed over the years as they experienced double digit growth each year. “We’d really outgrown our previous installation,” said Tom Patterson, Director of IT. In 2020, they grew their revenue by 36%, bringing their total to $1.3 billion. And in 2021, their online members increased by two million.

Given that their business models have evolved, it was important to have their entire infrastructure in the cloud to take advantage of the flexibility and sustainability that exists in this platform. When migrating to the cloud, Cricut needed to have as little downtime as possible as their customers are world wide and site access is needed 24/7. As a warning to their users, Cricut announced that their site was going to be down for eight hours for maintenance. In the backend, four hours were marked to complete the migration, but the entire transition happened in two hours.

Inside the cloud, Cricut has infrastructure flexibility, eliminating the need to purchase hardware to manage on-premise systems every few years. Given their site usage fluctuates throughout the year, AWS Cloud allows Cricut to size their infrastructure based on current demand. Even more so, they no longer need to internally manage the infrastructure as AWS handles this, which reduces cost for their IT department. Most importantly, their users were not aware of any technical changes that happened. After the migration, customer orders were processed as normal and with no delay under the new infrastructure.

The Impact

With Cricut’s entire infrastructure in the cloud, they no longer have to financially plan for hardware to manage on-premises systems and now have the capabilities to scale it to their changing needs. Additionally, they have the confidence in knowing that their disaster recovery plan can be enacted in a matter of minutes so no data is lost or downtime is needed to recover. The flexibility of the cloud sets the foundation for Cricut to upgrade their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Patterson said, “What’s next for us is S/4HANA. We need to upgrade our system, prepare for the future, complete the digital transformation, and we’re [now] poised to be able to do that.”

by Avvale