Cloud & Infrastructure
To the Cloud
and beyond
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The 2020 pandemic, the widespread implementation of working from home and the increasing digitalisation of services have prompted a large number of companies to accelerate their digital transformation. IT Departments now need to rethink their IT infrastructure with the aim of making it more agile and moving towards the Cloud.
Cloudification, or migration to the Cloud, refers to an organisation transferring its IT systems, applications, data and services from a traditional On-Prem infrastructure to a Cloud environment. It often involves migrating physical servers and entire data centres to public, private or hybrid cloud platforms.
This approach offers a number of advantages, enabling businesses to reduce their infrastructure, hardware and maintenance costs, and benefit from flexible, adaptive, collaborative and secure tools and services.
Reliability: a critical requirement
Digitalisation now requires companies to ensure the security, availability and resilience of their information systems at all times. While Cloud services have the advantage of being highly scalable, migration can be complex, leading to errors and even service interruptions.
Nowadays, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) provides a response to the need to combine rapid development with service reliability. This approach, born of the DevOps culture, aims to maintain and improve the performance and availability of applications and to speed up delivery by automating the most time-consuming tasks linked to testing, deployment and observability. It strengthens collaboration between development and production teams, helps to reduce expenditure on infrastructure and resource management, and contributes significantly to improving customer satisfaction.
Regardless of their company’s Cloud maturity, ALTEN supports its customers throughout their transformation, from the definition of a “Move to Cloud” strategy through to the implementation of dedicated governance, including the development of an operational model, the automation of deployments and the training of internal teams. This offer is based on a proven methodology and four specific pillars: Cloud transformation consulting, Build & Move2Cloud, Site Reliability Engineering and the financial optimisation of Cloud resources.
Advise – Integrate – Migrate – Automate
Our expertise
Cloud transformation consulting
Objective: To support your company at every stage in its migration
With its comprehensive knowledge of information systems, ALTEN provides you with its vision and expertise in your cloudification approach, offering advice on multi-Cloud integration, the optimisation of your On-Prem infrastructure, the development of your Cloud-Native applications, the development of a new operational model and the implementation of automation chains for private and public Clouds.
We are therefore in a position to work on:
- Defining your Cloud journey
Advice, with a commitment to resources or results, on your IT system migration strategy. - The foundation of your infrastructure
Support in setting up Cloud governance, security and connectivity standards, and architecture patterns that will ensure your applications can be hosted on the target IT system. - Conducting a Cloud maturity audit
Review of existing systems and definition of a decision tree to model your target application architectures. - Studying business cases
Definition of an economic model combining the impact of implementing the target IS and managing the existing system.
Measurement of the integration effort in relation to operational savings.
Reference:
ALTEN recently supported one of its customers in building a complete ecosystem bringing together all information relating to its industry. The primary objective of this platform was to make available to all players in the sector the enormous amount of data previously confined to corporate or functional silos, and to enable everyone to have access to the right information at the right time.
Build & Move2Cloud
Objective: To support the migration of your existing applications and the integration of CloudNative applications
Reducing the time it takes to integrate and migrate applications to the Cloud is a major challenge for our customers. When these times are too long, they can lead to a complex functional or structural Double Run.
To reduce the cost of this transition, ALTEN trains its consultants in Cloud technologies and makes use of the appropriate tools and skills:
- Our certified Cloud / DevOps Architects and experts have all the SMACS (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Security) skills.
- Automation has become the watchword for Cloud performance. All of our consultants therefore have knowledge of scripting and infrastructure development.
- We use DevOps languages and methodologies such as Infra as Code to manage and provision an infrastructure more efficiently.
- For large-scale migrations, our consultants can support you throughout the migration of your critical applications, whether simple or complex, while maintaining a balanced Cost / Performance ratio.
Reference:
As part of a drive to consolidate its operations, our customer decided to outsource the maintenance of its 100/150 applications to a single company. ALTEN, an expert in setting up efficient and flexible Service Centres, has been chosen to successfully industrialise its Application Management, implement the agile method, set up continuous integration and deployment and migrate IT environments to Azure Cloud.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Objective: To ensure the reliability of your applications during and after migration thanks to an operational model based on SRE
The arrival of the Cloud, whether private or public, is transforming our customers’ information systems on a massive scale. They are now concentrating their efforts on the migration and development of Cloud-Native services, expecting Cloud Providers to also take responsibility for the operational reliability of this new model. However, for the system to be fully reliable, centralised and resilient, it must also guarantee that applications can go into production.
Site Reliability Engineering is an operational application of DevOps aimed at ensuring the reliability of applications. This approach, initiated by Google in its application release management, is based on the desire to combine rapid development with predictability in the behaviour of digital services.
Implementing such an approach in a company offers a number of advantages, including:
- Maintaining and improving application performance and availability.
- Speeding up the delivery of updates and features by automating the most time-consuming tasks linked to testing, deployment and observability.
- Strengthening collaboration between development and production teams.
- Reducing expenditure on infrastructure and resource management.
Ultimately, the SRE approach makes a major contribution to improving customer satisfaction by offering more reliable and efficient services. It therefore provides an interesting response to the need to transform our customers’ operating model, although this means adapting the approach to a traditional IT environment. To support its customers, ALTEN has therefore designed a specialised framework based on:
- Feedback: Presentation of the SRE approach, its issues, its methodology and its automation tools through concrete examples of implementation in companies.
- A maturity analysis: In-depth audit of your company’s SRE maturity level, whether in terms of its human, non-human, industrial or operational assets.
We are drawing up a clear matrix of the roles of each person within an organisation redesigned to integrate the SRE, by studying the toolchain, the procedures in place for developing and deploying digital services, and the operating processes. - An SRE pilot phase: Implementation of the SRE on a pilot application in order to identify the potential technical and structural levers or obstacles impacting its implementation.
- Scaling up: On the basis of this initial experimentation, definition of a detailed action plan to integrate the SRE throughout your company, through organisational changes, dedicated training or the introduction of tools.
Reference:
In order to accelerate and strengthen its migration to the public cloud, a customer asked ALTEN to establish its new operational model and to define, industrialise and automate the new processes within its organisation.
Our experts therefore provided effective support to the in-house teams on technical issues relating to Move/Build to Cloud, automation, monitoring and alerting, as well as raising their awareness and training them in the DevOps culture.
FinOps
Objective: To optimise the costs of your company’s Multi-Cloud system once it has been integrated and set up
The FinOps approach is intended to monitor and optimise the costs associated with Cloud migration and, more generally, with the use of IT resources within a company. In short, it ensures that the services provided remain financially responsible. It’s not just a question of making savings, but also, in the wake of agile methods, of moving towards better collaboration between teams, better performance, better technological choices and, therefore, better investment.
We can help you control, manage and optimise your financial resources linked to the Cloud, notify you in the event of over-consumption or wastage of resources, and support your Finance Department in its CAPEX to OPEX transition. Our actions are focused mainly on:
- Controlling Multi-Cloud and Multi-Service costs
- Implementing and managing cost consolidation tools, automated processes and appropriate dashboards
- Helping you to adopt the new uses of the Cloud
- Monitoring and alerting in the event of over-consumption
- Drawing up application budgets and Multi-Cloud scenarios
- Cloud governance support
- Decision-making support
Reference:
Already supported by ALTEN in its Cloud migration, one customer also wanted to benefit from the Group’s expertise in cost and resource control. As part of its level 3 application support and IT infrastructure management remit, our team therefore worked to optimise the financial resources committed to the migration. Monitoring, alerting and reporting tools have been put in place to improve the quality of incident handling, optimise the IT environment and control Cloud consumption.
