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Background
For 113 years, Schréder has designed, manufactured or assembled, and sold public lighting products and has now evolved towards smart lighting solutions, deployed in very various places from highways and tunnels, residential streets and pedestrian
areas, to monuments, large buildings and more. With sales offices in more than 40 countries, Schréder deploys and enlightens places all around the world, evolving from traditional bulbs to nowadays intelligent, multi-modal, LED based solutions,
also leveraging IoT devices for enhanced serviceability. Facing platform offerings challenges including a new business model and new technologies requirements, Schréder has decided to move its complete IT landscape into the Cloud. With 2600
employees in 35 countries, scattered over 45 sites, a complex and integrated applications landscape composed of 120 high-availability servers in the back-office environment and 230 servers distributed around the world, Schréder has taken the
strategic decision to leverage a selected combination of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions for its back-office.
To enable its move to the Cloud and the management of its whole infrastructure, digital workplace and global cybersecurity, Schréder has once again selected Sopra Steria, its former outsourcer. As a longstanding early adopter and user of Microsoft’s
products, Schréder has naturally requested its IT landscape to be hosted in Microsoft Azure. Sopra Steria’s Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) has teamed up with Microsoft’s Fasttrack team to support this business critical migration.
This transformation aimed at accelerating Schréder’s business responsiveness, agility and growth, through the strong adoption of a Cloud-first culture and innovative technology services, such as Internet of Things (IoT), data and business
analytics, while ensuring the highest security implementation of its global infrastructure.
Cloud-powered lighting solution provisioned thanks to Sopra Steria Managed Services
Expert in lightability and smart lighting solutions, Schréder strives to innovate, using technologies to enable safer, more sustainable spaces with well-being for everyone. It became essential for the company to take advantage of Cloud technologies
(flexibility, performance, global footprint, sustainability, and innovative services) to sustain its SLA, control and optimize costs while strengthening its security against new cyber threats.
Schréder’s Group IT Department decided to renew its trust for the 3rd time in Sopra Steria to achieve this transformation. This important transition started with a 3-month migration of 120 servers from its former provider’s
on-premise facilities to Microsoft Azure. This migration was technically executed by means of both lift-and-shift and reinstallation of virtual servers. On the operational side, Sopra Steria’s local CCoE ensured a smooth service take-over from
the incumbent. During this overhaul, Microsoft Azure’s Fast Track team provided assistance through on-spot support on the bespoke architecture and design of the required secure Cloud architecture. Sopra Steria’s CCoE deployed the full
IaaS environment supporting strategic application workloads such as MS Dynamics AX, MS Dynamics CRM, MS BizTalk, MS SharePoint, PTC Windchill or PrecisionPoint in Azure. This move leveraged from start cloud-native service capabilities offered in Azure
like backup, disaster recovery, high availability groups and resources, and a highly secured network design. The management of this new Cloud environment now relies on a competitive and industrialized Service Catalogue-based offering ensuring a predictable
price per managed server or tailored service request. Sopra Steria’s 24x7 support, end-to-end monitoring and operational teams manage more than 150 incidents, service requests and changes per month. In parallel, Sopra Steria also administrates
the over 1,800 employees which were migrated to Microsoft Digital Workplace Services such as Office 365 and Teams, and remotely manages the domain controllers local to the more than 45 Schréder’s operational and commercial sites spread
worldwide.
This infrastructure and digital workplace modernization has been strengthened with the implementation and enforcement of a comprehensive global security framework and SOC operations, bringing improvements and alignment to a wide set of security best practices
(protecting, detecting and remediation activities). Sopra Steria’s best-in-class and ISO 27001 certified security practices has been instrumental while relying on Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection and Security Centre. This first phase
of transformation has helped Schréder to reinforce its quality of services, guaranteed by SLA, but has also shown the value of modern Cloud Operations services.
In a second phase, the experience showing the importance of cost management of Cloud resources, activities will include a Cloud Economics approach, aligning technical and operational teams on a FinOps practices. This improvement will be completed with
advanced observability allowing to automate and optimise the resources usage, hence reducing or limiting costs when consumption isn’t actually required.
In a recent, second digital transformation initiative, Schréder has launched a new strategic technology project based on the deployment of specialised custom IoT devices to offer its customers a rich and flexible experience of its smart lighting
solution, aimed at combining specialised added value features to its lighting poles, especially outdoors and in cities, like smart screens, loudspeakers, TV cameras, Wifi network, electric vehicle chargers and more, for a sustainable and high quality
experience of residents and citizens.
This project leverages Microsoft Azure IoT services in combination with Azure Kubernetes services for an integrated, scalable and high performance platform for its solution. Sopra Steria’s CCoE helped in the design of a secure, scalable and efficient
cloud platform by enabling Azure IoT and Azure Kubernetes containerization, and now operates and maintains the platform in high availability and automated scalability mode.
This global contract allows Schréder’s Teams to benefit from a unified vision improving quality of service, a high-availability service ensuring business continuity with the right services for each workload and end-user, by relying on Sopra
Steria’s Cloud Centre of Excellence to leverage IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud services and provide a SLA-based managed service.
Benefits
For the IS Department
- Cloud transition risk mitigation
- Flexible capacity aligned with business
- Improvement of quality of services
- Cybersecurity at the era of Digital
- Better cloud costs control
For Business Teams
- Increased pace of innovation for supporting innovative services relying on IoT
- A global delivery model embracing the 35 countries
- Environmental benefits due to reduced emissions from data center aligned with the company’s sustainability objective
With a century-long tradition of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, Schréder pushes the limits of business towards smart lighting and outdoor systems. By supporting a holistic approach including IT, Digital Workplace and cybersecurity for adopting
Cloud technologies, we can provide new cutting-edge and secured workloads to help business gaining advantages.
JEAN-JACQUES VAN GILS
Group IT Director at Schréder