Everything you always wanted to know about the Cloud!

The Cloud in figures – Jean-Luc Couasnon, Gartner

The Cloud was born about the same time as the Internet, 30 years ago, and in its genes was the sharing of data, of information. It offers all the advantages of rapid access to a technology and its services.

Today, the Cloud represents a market of 200 billion, with 56% in the United States. France is rather behind, perhaps because the culture of exchange is less prevalent. And especially in France, the Cloud is used essentially in the private context of the home, rather than in companies.

China, used to great leaps forward, and bottom of the list ten years ago, is now just behind the United States.

How ENGIE welcomed the cloud - Claude Pierre, ENGIE

In the context of ENGIE's strategic move to become leader in the energy transition, its range of activities has evolved considerably in a short time: sale of assets related to the production of coal, investment in renewable energy. New entities and employees had to be rapidly integrated. At the same time, ENGIE has established a highly decentralised organisation with decision-making centres as close as possible to local markets. In short, solutions had to be found very quickly to move towards the « Glocal », global and local both, combining the power of a large group with agility.

We have chosen cloud solutions that bring us speed and scalability. Cloud solutions are also naturally innovative. They evolve and are constantly updated in an « evergreen » logic. In 6 months, using Microsoft's Office 365 solutions, we were able to deploy to more than 100,000 employees worldwide - from Shanghai to Santiago – a platform that allows everyone to exchange files, work in project mode, and share the same system on a global scale.

Employees have been quick to adopt these solutions because they are already using them in their personal lives. They dialogue very easily on Facebook or Whatsapp, and it was time to enable them to do this in a professional context.

We often think that the cloud is dangerous, that our data is not safe. However, if you look at the major « cyber crises » of recent years, it is not the Cloud that has been attacked but corporate data centers. At ENGIE, it is with Cloud solutions that we are developing our maturity in matters of cyber security. We have replaced the firewalls with a kind of « Cloud umbrella » that protects all the ENGIE entities, using a system protecting identities and access. And that system is in the Cloud.

A question of trust – Alfonso Castro, Microsoft

The question of trust is crucial for the Cloud. A third party is entrusted with the data that today constitutes the wealth of a company. There are several dimensions to trust, which may or may not be linked to factual elements such as certification or volume of events.

For example, in the Azure Cloud, we deal with 6,500 billion events a day. One event might be, for example, the fact that Alfonso Castro identifies himself at his workstation in Paris at 8am. If the same Alfonso Castro tries to authenticate at 9:30 in New Delhi, then there's a problem! An analysis is launched and algorithms are put into action; elements such as this provide an exceptional level of security.

How public bodies see it – Constance Nebbula, Angers City Council

For a public body such as a City Council, the clients are the inhabitants of the city. They use the public services, but rarely take an interest in the tools used to provide them.

In Angers, we have not chosen an « all-cloud » appoach. For each need, each service, we check whether a solution is available in the cloud, but we apply our own criteria. For a public body, moving to the cloud requires a great deal of effort and above all a paradigm shift. We must take into account the maturity of the offer, its durability, and of course safety and cost. Sometimes we prefer to keep control, even though it's more expensive and requires more maintenance. We favour solutions that can be added to the existing system fairly simply. And it is also essential for changes to be reversible.

For the user, as long as the service is there and does the job, the question of cloud or not-cloud never arises. And as modern and innovative as a proposed solution may be, we must continue to receive the public, because certain people have no access to digital technology.

A Cloud that is virtuous in terms of energy and the necessary evolution of usage - Servane Augier, Dassault

In the next 4-5 years, 85% of company data centers will close. At the same time, there will be 20 times more connected objects, of which a third do not yet exist. The Cloud is sometimes criticized for being energy-intensive, but it's rather like comparing the fuel consumption of a private car with that of a bus. The cloud solution is shared, with a better "unit" efficiency because it is spread over a larger number of users than an internal solution with its hosting, its storage... and its own digital pollution.

The cloud rationalizes the use of machines that are supposed to be fuller of data than many servers in many places. But the environmental effect does not only come from the cloud, which is by nature quite virtuous. On the other hand, data volume is expected to multiply by 10,000 over the next five years. The more we multiply uses and data, keeping 5,000 photos where before we had 5, the more we will consume. Everything we do counts, corporately or as individuals. Even if today we can store everything we want, we will have to change our habits, clean out our mailboxes and files, if we want to avoid multiplying by 10,000.

An optimistic conclusion from Erik Orsenna, economist and writer

The sharing of data is extraordinarily effective. In 10 days, the Chinese successfully sequenced the coronavirus genome, and the Institut Pasteur rapidly determined the simplest test to identify an asymptomatic patient. So it was openness and sharing that increased trust, even though on medical issues this is often non-existent.