How Alstom is moving towards an “optimal cloud strategy with controlled costs”

Alstom’s roadmap promises to be particularly busy for the next five years as evidenced by the content of the tender won by DXC Technology. The IT service provider is renewed in its functions.

And he will have a lot to do within the framework of the contract which indeed covers the entire Alstom information system. However, priorities are emerging. Among these, the optimization of the cloud infrastructure is in the lead.

From the cloud, but at a lower cost and hybrid

Alstom intends to make progress in this sector. His supplier will therefore be responsible for developing “an optimal cloud strategy with controlled costs”. DXC will also have to operate on a large scale since the project involves 122 sites.

In order to achieve this optimized infrastructure, particularly in terms of costs, Alstom has defined areas of improvement. Among these, he cites the rationalization of the urbanization of its infrastructures.

The expected optimization will also involve a ”modernization” of enterprise applications, including SAP. To reconcile cloud and cost control, the exclusive use of the public cloud is not necessarily the best option.

Thus“ “to protect its data and control its costs, DXC will help Alstom to maintain its data center infrastructure on certain sites”” indicates the technological partner of the industrial group.

1000 VMs migrated to Azure

Stéphane Detruiseux, director of information security and vice-president of technology at Alstom, insists on the expectations in favor of ”a secure and flexible infrastructure“, necessary according to him to “accelerate the agility of the company and lay the foundations for future growth.”This trajectory translates into a cloud strategy focused on the hybridization of IS and infrastructures.

“The migration and optimization of our infrastructure to the public cloud and hybrid cloud was a key element of this transformation and working with DXC allows us to choose the most efficient and cost-effective solutions,” comments Alstom’s IT executive, who once again points out the cost.

The implementation of the cloud strategy and the optimization plan has already begun, as the supplier emphasizes, for example through the deployment of DXC Platform X for IT production automation.

The result: the unification of the “storage, network and computing functions in a single and highly virtualized solution.”In terms of infrastructure, this has resulted in the migration of more than 1,000 virtual machines to Microsoft Azure.