Cloud First Strategy: how Sopra Steria is supporting Veolia's digital transformation

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The global leader in optimised resource management (water, energy, waste management, etc.), Veolia began its Digital Transformation in 2015, by modernising its workstations and digitisating its service offers.

To create its "Digital Environment," the company has focused on three main areas: digitisating its workspaces, a “Datacenterless” and "Cloud First" strategy, and lastly creating a business data platform to support its IoT strategy.

In order to accelerate this change, Veolia called upon Sopra Steria teams to roll out Cloud best practices – including a Digital Factory to foster new and innovative services for business departments.

Sopra Steria is supporting Veolia in its choice of Cloud applications. It is also assisting Veolia with the migration process for these applications as well as optimised Cloud operations management in agile mode, as inspired by the Site Reliability Engineering - SRE concept.


From Consulting to managed services: Sopra Steria's end-to-end support

This strategy was implemented by Beamap, a Sopra Steria entity specialised in Cloud consulting, and Sopra Steria's Infrastructure Management teams. First of all, Beamap was involved in creating business cases to determine which existing applications could be migrated to the chosen Cloud - in this case it was AWS. Beamap then helped Veolia to develop a vast "Digital Factory" plan which incorporates more than 200 teams. The purpose of this structure is to be a facilitating force for digital transformation.

By reflecting on the new uses of Cloud platforms, the Digital Factory lays the foundations for new business services. In addition, Beamap also helped to establish a Cloud Marketing plan which paved the way for acculturation tools for Veolia's staff (white papers, newsletter etc.).

In a second phase, Sopra Steria's Infrastructure Management teams took responsibility for managing Cloud operations in sync with Veolia's teams, ensuring migration to the Cloud (AWS, Google Cloud). They implemented multimodal governance covering the areas of On-Premise, Cloud and Cybersecurity.

The goal is to provide a suitable response to each generation of IT, while maintaining a unified vision and quality of service. As part of the Site Reliability Engineering - SRE approach, particular emphasis was given to operations’ automation - "Infrastructure as Code" - to take full advantage of Cloud services.

Therefore, Cloud Operations are aligned with NoOps approaches, for the purpose of reducing repetitive set activities and encouraging the auto-remediation of services.

In addition, a suite of DevOps tools was deployed to enable Veolia to fully exploit the agility offered by the Cloud. At the same time, Veolia's teams benefited from coaching sessions on the agile method, conducted by Beamap.

"For improved responsiveness, flexibility and cost control, we choose the Public Cloud",

Hervé Dumas, Group CIO, Veolia France

 

Benefits

For the IS Department

  • Cloud transition risk control.
  • Cost reductions, with automation of changes and auto-remediation.
  • Pay-per-use for Cloud and managed services, incorporating budget predictability.
  • Organisational efficiency thanks to revamping of organisations, processes and tools.
  • Improvement in quality of services, with a single tool.

For Operational Teams

  • A more innovative service offering, making it possible to manage the mass of exponential data created by Industry 4.0.
  • Enhanced business responsiveness with preassembly of turnkey components.
  • Flexibility of scope, and automated and fluid integrations and deployments. 

Key Figures

  • 170,000 Veolia employees in 50 countries
  • 25,000 servers and 10 million connected devices
  • 50 billiooperational files recorded in the Datalake
  • Seamless service transition in 80 days
  • 150+ managed applications in Cloud mode and 1,000 in the future