IT Carve-out – effective separation of IT infrastructure for the Natura Drugstore chain

Mutares, owner of the nationwide Natura drugstore chain, is a key player in the Polish cosmetics distribution and sales market. Currently, the drugstore chain includes nearly 200 stores, employs over 800 employees and generates annual revenues of several hundred million zlotys.

Introduction

In December 2024, after acquiring Natura, Mutares decided to carry out a full IT carve-out. The project aimed to fully separate the IT infrastructure from the previous owner’s systems, which also served as an IT service provider and private cloud.

Challenge

The biggest challenge of the project was the strict schedule – less than half a year was planned for the implementation of the entire operation. Another challenge was the access architecture, which assumed implementation without direct contact with the migrated systems.

Main design difficulties:

Specificity of the shared environment: The implementation process assumed a phased assignment of permissions, which allowed for secure coordination of work between many entities until the final migration of the system.
Business continuity: The need to carry out operations in a completely transparent way for the chain’s sales processes.

Solution

To meet deadlines, the Exorigo-Upos team parallelised processes wherever possible. In areas with limited source documentation, the company used reverse engineering, obtained parameters directly from the systems it could access, and conducted in-depth technical interviews with Natura’s IT staff.

The project has been divided into key stages:

Audit and inventory: Detailed identification of resources in drugstores and central infrastructure.
Architecture design: Develop a high-level migration plan and target IT environment.
Prepare the target environment: Configure the Data Centre, network infrastructure, Exorigo CLOUD, and Azure tenant.
Initial work on migration: Installation of backup systems in the source environment and test configuration of connections.
Production migration (D-Day): The final transfer of resources during one weekend.

Result

The team completed the key migration stage over one weekend, avoiding downtime for store operations. The detailed “D-Day” schedule included more than 260 tasks, with lead times defined to the minute.

Technical effect

Physical relocation: Secure transport of arrays, servers and blades from Łódź to the modern Exorigo-Upos Data Centre in Warsaw.
Virtual migration: Moving all servers to the Exorigo CLOUD virtualisation cloud.
Work environment: Full migration of M365 service for 800 employees to a new, isolated tenant of Natura.

The Steering Committee’s constant progress monitoring and full team mobilisation enabled ongoing resolution of emerging difficulties and completion of work within budget.

Summary

Through Exorigo-Upos’s implementation of the project, Natura achieved its main goal: full technological autonomy from the previous owner by the end of June 2025.

Modern infrastructure: Switching to Exorigo CLOUD has resulted in higher performance and fewer system failures.
Security: Segregate data and systems in a dedicated, secure environment.
Partnership: After a successful migration, Exorigo-Upos took over the ongoing maintenance of the IT infrastructure, providing 24/7 support.

For Exorigo-Upos, this project was one of the most demanding IT Carve-out projects, confirming competence in managing critical migrations under time pressure.