Cellenza supports Thales Digital Factory

With its Digital Factory, Thales is able to scale up thanks to Azure Landing Zones.

Thales is a French international group with 80,000 employees in some 60 countries. Thales operates in security, defense, air and rail transport, banking, and telecommunications. Its customers are major organizations of vital importance (OVIs).

Thales Digital Factory is the entity responsible for driving innovation and accelerating digital transformation at Thales. Founded in 2017, it boasts 250 employees at three sites: Paris, Montréal, and Singapore.

In September 2020, Thales Digital Factory called on Cellenza to help it overhaul its landing zones—environments used to host services—from design through development and maintenance in operational condition (MOC). The goal is to move from an innovation platform to an industrial one that is more efficient, resilient, and secure, simplifying the cloud for users

The first landing zones were made available in late March 2021: Stéphane El Mabrouk (Head of Delivery at Thales Digital Factory) and Olivier Carre (Tribe Lead Managed Cloud Services at Thales Digital Factory) share their feedback on Thales Digital Factory’s collaboration with Cellenza.

How did you hear about Cellenza?

We were looking for a partner with extensive Azure experience. Thanks to our internal network, we discovered Cellenza, a company with recognized experience in the banking sector, in Azure, and with strong security needs. This was precisely what we were searching for.

What problems did you turn to Cellenza to solve?

The goal of the Landing Zones was to make it easier for users to adopt the cloud. So, we asked Cellenza to provide us with a technical vision. The first step was translating our security and operational requirements into a set of technical configurations and architectures that could be deployed on top of Azure.

From an organizational standpoint, ensuring that the landing zones remained operational and secure after they were deployed and in use was also critical. Cellenza presented an approach that would define and industrialize the deployment of the Landing Zones, as well as their MCO and life cycle.

In terms of user experience, the idea was to be able to provide Landing Zone deployment via APIs, allowing users to consume them in self-service mode through the Thales Digital Factory service catalog. It was also important for the customer care team to be able to interface with the request portal.

Today, the result is that it takes less than an hour to deploy a landing zone, with no manual intervention and just a few validation steps.

“Cellenza has made significant investments in delivery and user support to ensure the successful migration to the cloud within these landing zones.”

Stéphane El Mabrouk, Head Of Delivery & Olivier Carre, Tribe Lead Managed Cloud Services

How have Thales Digital Factory and its customers benefited from Cellenza’s landing zones approach?

The first benefit was to get us to think about what a landing zone actually is. What value should it provide? How should it fit into the larger organizational context? Cellenza made significant contributions to the definition of a landing zone and the development of technical architectures and associated tools for their maintenance.

From a site reliability engineering (SRE) perspective, there is also an important “on-call” component. We particularly valued Cellenza’s engagement in responding to users on both general and specific cloud-related queries, whether in early or advanced versions of the landing zones. Cellenza has made significant investments in delivery and user support to ensure the successful migration to the cloud within these landing zones.

What were the internal and external benefits for Thales?

The first users were internal teams, primarily those responsible for the data lake and data hub, and the software factory teams. They gave us very specific feedback. The benefits to our internal users include faster time to market and ease of use of the various Azure resources.

For Thales entities, which represent the majority of customers, the platform offers Products as a Service, and the landing zone provides products to simplify the complexity of the cloud. This allows business lines to focus on their core business: development and application operations. This product concept, which combines security, resilience, and cost, simplifies the Azure marketplace and provides an optimal user experience.

What results have you seen?

We deployed two types of landing zones in one year: 60 landing zones for the first type and 80 for the second. We’re seeing an interesting time to market and a real time saving for the users. The security aspect is also important: the security teams checked the robustness of the landing zones. Issues of resilience and economic efficiency were also challenged, as landing zones will be billed to users on a pay-as-you-go basis.

How did the collaboration with Cellenza go?

We’ve just completed a year-long project with excellent collaboration. Cellenza provided the Azure expertise we were looking for, and they were able to ramp up quickly to meet our security requirements while working closely with the Thales teams. We have achieved our goal, and it is a fantastic success for both of us!