Cloud Strategy and Cloud Platform Prototype

A French Ministry sought to define its future cloud strategy and implement a prototype in a changing strategic context for the state in the face of the technical obsolescence of its current platform. The Ministry called on Orange to upgrade its platform.

As part of an interministerial study, the main objective of this service, entrusted to Sofrecom's Cloud Architecture department, was to support the ministry in defining its cloud strategy. The project was oriented towards an "internal cloud," given the sensitivity of the data.

In this context, the Senior Cloud Architect drafted a statement expressing the Ministry's needs in terms of application containerization and CaaS hosting. They also identified several possible IaaS/CaaS duos that meet the Ministry's requirements before implementing a Redhat Open Shift prototype to test the use cases identified by the latter. Finally, they determined the roadmap for the implementation of this new platform, with the task of supporting the migration of over 4,500 applications!

The Ministry's objective was to eventually have a platform offering multiple levels of service (IaaS/CaaS/PaaS) to host both its LEGACY applications in the form of virtual machines and its containerized and Cloud Native applications already developed or under development.

To meet these needs, our Cloud architects proposed a proven approach combining an analysis of the existing situation with recommendations for a future solution:

• Initiation of opportunity study: description of the state of the art in Cloud Computing and benchmarks of the private Cloud market.
• Assessment of interoperability between the various solutions envisaged and the existing IT infrastructure.
• Analysis of possible use cases (CaaS), as well as their constraints and limitations.
• Analysis of different scenarios: study of possible IaaS/PaaS combinations among existing solutions on the market, designed to host the new platform.
• Discussions with suppliers to obtain in-depth technical and commercial proposals.
• Implementation of a POC/Redhat Open Shift demonstrator (servers, storage and network infrastructure provided by the Ministry) from among the duos studied previously with the selected suppliers.
• Evaluation of the technical and commercial proposals, as well as the acquisition, support, installation and migration costs of each solution over five years for each of the scenarios studied.
• Final feedback to management for their decision-making.

The Sofrecom team's skills in Cloud Architecture were essential in facilitating and delivering the expected technical support while capitalizing on the analysis of existing IT infrastructure and on the documents provided by the Ministry.

Conclusion

Sofrecom's organizational maturity study and cloud technical environment audit enabled the Ministry, which handles sensitive data, to:

• Define the main directions of its Cloud offerings (private and Hyperscaler).
• Gain a clear view as to the state of its IT assets.
• Measure its readiness to containerize applications and migrate them to an IaaS/CaaS platform while controlling costs and internal resources.