In addition to non-structural software packages, some companies are choosing to outsource a large part of their information system, or even all of their applications, to the cloud. The Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (French National Research Agency) and BEL cheese dairies are just two examples.
When it comes to taking the plunge into the cloud, companies often choose to outsource the non-critical parts of their information systems and keep their structural IT in-house. On the other hand
of this approach, others are choosing Infrastructure as a Service as a solution to enable them to concentrate fully on their core business.
The French National Research Agency (ANR) opted for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) very early on, in 2007. At the time, the ANR had very few resources dedicated to IT, and a small number of staff.
(around fifty employees) and temporary premises. To minimise its IT infrastructure management costs, the ANR began by outsourcing less critical applications: office automation, email, file storage and sharing.
Gradual outsourcing
As the days went by, outsourcing expanded and focused on business applications: a central application for managing calls for projects, followed by in-house developments for specific calls for projects. Next came the budget and accounting application, based on SAP software and a Microsoft SQL server database. To secure its service delegation, the ANR set up a disaster recovery plan for SAP, a local Help Desk (Nanterre) with dedicated technicians on the customer's premises, coupled with an incident management tool (based on GPLI), and a commitment to data confidentiality. To date, the ANR's information system is 100% cloud, deployed on 70 servers in 4 datacentres.
BEL: a textbook case of the infrastructure CLOUD
This positive feedback from the ANR is shared by BEL cheese dairies. It all began here too in 2007, when the group decided to review the governance of its information system. Yves Gauguier, the Group's IT Director, set himself a number of objectives: to limit the heterogeneity of IT systems spread around the world, to ensure 24/7 support for all services via a robust, industrial infrastructure platform, to professionalise the IT Department with in-house IT teams exploiting digital opportunities to serve the Group's businesses and activities. To achieve these objectives, a number of decisions will be taken, ranging from the implementation of SAP at international level to the reorganisation of the IT Department and strategic outsourcing choices. What should be kept in-house? What can be outsourced, and what are the benefits?
The group soon realised that it could not operate the desired high-availability infrastructure platform itself, due to a lack of resources and an inadequate structure. To overcome these constraints, Bel decided to switch to an "Infrastructure as a Service" model. After an initial, unsatisfactory contract, BEL changed service providers with a more detailed set of specifications, both for monitoring the services required for each application and for the commitments expected, specifying their nature in terms of high availability.
Business Continuity Planning, storage space monitoring, incident response time and administration services are now prerequisites. BEL has also decided to separate technical outsourcing and SAP administration, two different businesses.
"Bel chose Cloud Temple (formerly Intrinsec), a specialist in Cloud hosting and outsourcing, and Oxya, an expert in SAP administration, to make the switch. Since this migration, BEL has not only made savings of over €30%, but above all the service commitments to the business have always been respected, to the point of making SAP version upgrades transparent. Yves Gauguier, convinced by the qualities and versatility of IaaS, is now planning his innovation projects (Big Data applications, digital projects) on these same infrastructures. "
Whether it's the ANR or BEL, these two organisations have achieved their objective thanks to the cloud: to provide quality services to their business units, without them having to worry about the underlying technical systems. In both cases, the results have been positive, and the CIOs are surprised that other organisations are sometimes reluctant to try this out.