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Sopra Steria played a key role in SNCF’s digital transformation by establishing a Cloud Migration Factory to modernise and migrate 90% of its applications to the cloud. We helped define cloud architectures, optimise migration scenarios, and implement Agile, DevOps, and FinOps practices to enhance efficiency, security, and cost control. By consolidating data centres, reducing technical debt, and leveraging multi-cloud solutions, Sopra Steria enabled faster deployments, improved scalability, and long-term sustainability. Our Cloud Centre of Excellence continues to support SNCF in maintaining and evolving its cloud strategy.
SNCF propels its digital transformation forward through large-scale, industrial, and selective multi-cloud adoption
SNCF group, operating in passenger and freight transport with 275,000 employees, decided to modernise and make its IT assets more agile by launching the Programme Renouveau du Socle Numérique (PRSN), with e.SNCF as the prime contractor. This programme includes a cloud component aimed at accelerating digital transformation through the emergence of new IoT and Big Data/Analytics applications while controlling costs. The group's information systems previously totalled four data centres, more than 700 regional machine rooms, and 14,800 servers, resulting in an annual IT budget exceeding one billion euros.
The challenge
SNCF's IT infrastructure needed to be consolidated into a new-generation data centre, known as Greenfield, and a disaster recovery site. The goal was to retain only 20 regional machine rooms to improve the carbon footprint and achieve savings of up to €400 million per year.
To better serve its business units, the SNCF group initiated a digital transformation project based on a "Cloud First" approach, aiming to migrate 90% of its application assets to the cloud while modernising a significant portion.
To support this industrial project, Sopra Steria Next assisted in establishing a "Cloud Migration Factory" for 200 applications entrusted to third-party application maintenance. This undertaking faced two challenges: adhering to a tight schedule and coordinating a joint approach with SNCF's two other IT partners, who were also responsible for part of these assets.
A high-speed migration to the Cloud
To address this project, Sopra Steria explored the implementation of a migration factory. The two-year transformation programme planned for:
- 30% of the group's 1,425 applications to migrate to a private cloud based on VMware, located in Greenfield;
- 45% to be modernised and hosted in the public cloud with pre-selected CSPs such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or IBM Cloud;
- 15% (physical servers) to be moved to a new data centre;
- and the remaining 10% to be decommissioned.
The mission to set up the Cloud Migration Factory encompassed analysing SNCF's IT assets through a Discovery Assessment mission, defining target private and public cloud architectures, constructing and testing the software factory according to DevOps principles, and organising and managing the Migration Factory.
The applications were partially modernised to eliminate technical debt, and some middleware components were transitioned to "Platform as a Service."
Migration scenarios were orchestrated in line with SNCF group's multi-cloud strategy, based on eligibility criteria related to business interest in these applications, technological obsolescence, security levels, and licence portability. This approach maximised ROI by promoting full rehosting and light replatforming approaches that reduce technological debt, improve security, and define new standards optimised for the cloud without technological lock-in.
Transforming SNCF's IT systems and team culture
The cloud also represents a profound cultural shift towards optimised time-to-market and an improved customer experience through better application scalability.
Sopra Steria Next's teams supported e.SNCF in an approach combining Agile and DevOps principles, emphasising automation and standardisation (CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code). Sopra Steria contributed to implementing a new financial model (FinOps), feeding a service catalogue and establishing new benchmarks for SNCF group's teams.
This approach was piloted and then rolled out across all 12 of SNCF Group's IT departments.
Once the Cloud Migration Factory was completed, another challenge for the SNCF Group was to ensure control of the factory and possess the associated know-how internally. To address this, a support system was defined with experts from the Sopra Steria Cloud Centre of Excellence to sustain the process over time.
The Cloud Migration Factory now serves as the reference framework for migrating and modernising applications managed by all three partner companies responsible for SNCF's IT assets. These partners have adjusted their respective contracts accordingly to integrate these new services.
The use cases driven by SNCF group's digital transformation have thus found an industrial and innovative foundation, meeting requirements in terms of time-to-market, scalability, and resilience. The combination of cloud technologies and the DevOps approach led by Sopra Steria Next's teams resulted in a clear improvement in deployment frequency – from several months to a few days – and in SLAs.
Alongside SNCF group's teams, Sopra Steria Next continues to support the advanced migration of applications under its responsibility.
- We offer a multidisciplinary, end-to-end approach.
- Our cloud expertise, (Sopra Steria Cloud Centre of Excellence), agile skills, DevOps culture, and collaborative mindset set us apart.
- Sopra Steria's teams were mobilised in an end-to-end approach to address the challenges of the Migration Factory programme: digital transformation consulting, application and infrastructure skills, and solution integration.
Benefits
- Reduction of the data centre footprint from four to two, along with the associated carbon footprint;
- Reduction in technical debt and associated security risks;
- Expected savings of several tens of millions of euros per year;
- Enhanced innovation capacity through services provided by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud; provision of sandboxes.
For business teams:
- Modernisation of applications during their transition to the cloud and standardisation of architectures for new applications;
- Better alignment with business expectations through the adoption of agile principles;
- Reduced time-to-market for new applications through DevOps approaches.