Answer the following questions based on the case below:

$1.$ What limitations were occurring due to the legacy system?

$2.$ What benefits did cloud storage bring?

$3.$ What benefits did Seven Central bring?

Seven$-$Eleven Japan uses Google Cloud to serve up real$-$time data for fast business decisions

April $26,2021$

The Google Cloud Japan team

With the rise of technologies like smartphones, retailers have felt the pressure to meet evolving consumer needs and expectations. Seven$-$Eleven Japan$($SEJ$)$ has long been on the forefront of this thanks to the way they develop and invest in IT$.$ However, in recent years, Japan$$s leading convenience store chain has struggled to maintain its complex legacy systems at the rate needed to keep up with today$$s rapid digitization, spurred on by the increasing proliferation of smartphones and an IT vendor$-$dependent structure.

Legacy systems limiting real$-$time responsiveness and innovation

Since its early days, SEJ has been proactive in adopting information technology, mainly relying on technology solutions from Japan$$s leading vendors. But as the systems have grown, key business issues have been resolved using a vendor$-$dependent structure rather than being driven by SEJ's own needs.

Datasets and business logic were combined and built into legacy environments, gradually leading to data silos. As a result, data was distributed across multiple systems, causing a variety of problems, including the inability to efficiently retrieve data when needed, delays in accessing data collected in individual stores, and difficulties taking measurements at the right time in business operations that require real$-$time responsiveness.

Connecting different systems also takes time and money, and the lead time for introducing new services$$from planning to development and launch$$has been longer than expected.

To solve these problems, SEJ's IT department built $$Seven Central$$a new platform for practical data use launched in $2020$ to support the company$$s future IT strategies and digital transformation initiatives.

At its core, Seven Central$$s ultimate purpose is to allow real$-$time data views. Versatile, real$-$time datasets$$such as point$-$of$-$sale $($POS$)$ data from $7-$Eleven stores$$are consolidated into a centralized location in the cloud. They created a simple data mart that provides data via an API to enable them to respond more quickly to requests from individual departments.

$"$In such uncertain times, it$$s vital to use data to make quick decisions," says Izuru Nishimura, Executive Officer and Head of ICT Department. "Each department across the entire company will be able to gain an immediate understanding of the situation based on the most up$-$to$-$date data and respond accordingly. This is why we built Seven Central."

Google Cloud selected to help SEJ build and grow their data cloud

Today's rapidly changing business environment has also highlighted the risk of IT support becoming a bottleneck. The long$-$term strategy is to gradually expand the datasets managed and collected in Seven Central according to business needs.

In the first phase, SEJ collected POS data from all $21,000+$ stores to enable real$-$time analysis. Moving forward, they would like to collect other relevant data$$for example, unstructured data, such as images and videos, or master datasets that are currently stored externally.

Google Cloud was already a top contender when SEJ started developing Seven Central in $2019.$ They compared various public cloud services besides Google Cloud, focusing on three main capabilities.

$"$We placed particular emphasis on service scalability to drive future digital transformation; security when handling data, which is the lifeline of our company; and finally, openness,$$ says Nishimura. He emphasizes that openness was perhaps the most important factor for choosing Google Cloud. Breaking away from the negative aspects of an entirely vendor$-$dependent system enabled them to build an agile development system with multiple vendors.

Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery and API management platform, Apigee, play a vital role in Seven Central. BigQuery$$s high$-$speed processing at petabyte scale and fully managed infrastructure helped keep costs low during development and verification.

"Data is stored in a way that allows you to share it easily across organizations, which helps solve the issue of data silos from the perspective of scalability. I also like the fact there are some interesting features that could be used in the future$$like BigQuery ML$,$ which enables machine learning on BigQuery," says Nishimura.

Apigee allows SEJ to separate datasets and business logic, which is one of the key points of Seven Central. While the trend these days is to standardize interfaces using an API, the reality tends to involve many different APIs rather than the introduction of one unified API. With Apigee, SEJ provides a single unified API for all of its data cloud, and they can now understand what data