At Veolia, sustainability is one of the cornerstones of our corporate philosophy. Whether by providing drinking water to millions of people around the world, processing nearly 50 million tons of waste annually, or providing energy services for many cities and industries around the world, we hope to work in a way that is beneficial to citizens and the environment .
The focus on sustainability extends to all aspects of our business.
This is why we switched to a cloud-based data management platform. This not only improves efficiency by simplifying processes, but it also helps to allocate resources better and work in a more environmentally friendly way.
Value instead of cost
At Veolia, we have always considered value, not just cost. Our decision to migrate to the cloud is a good example. Indeed, providing an operating model that is more focused on sustainable development helps our company maintain high reliability and scalability while maintaining good ethics as much as possible.
100% of the energy purchased by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) comes from renewable energy, which makes its data center completely carbon neutral. Thanks to it, together with ServiceNow, we moved to the serverless model and only used the exact amount of resources required for time T.
This method is part of a concept called “Digital Sobriety”, which includes processes that use less energy consumption when possible.
However, the benefit of moving to a cloud-based solution is not just the environment. During the health crisis, as remote work has become commonplace, it is priceless for our employees to have access to necessary information no matter where they are.
In addition, the GCP platform itself has security, which is essential for companies today. We apply this basic principle to all our systems, namely “design security”.
Multi-cloud approach
One of the main goals of Veolia CoE ITSM is to enable our employees to focus on the most important aspects of their work.
We believe that the IT team should focus its energy on higher value-added operations, instead of devoting a lot of business time to repetitive tasks (such as shutting down or repairing servers every night) and DevOps.
Compared with past monolithic systems, this allows us to adapt to the evolving “microservice” architecture. ServiceNow has enhanced the migration to Google Cloud Platform, which is an essential step in this transition process.
Google Cloud’s ServiceNow portal allows us to manage all cloud projects through a centralized solution. As a result, the workflow is simplified, and our employees have more time to deal with actual IT challenges.
Our increasing control over the management of project requests on the GCP platform is a good example of this simplification.
Using the ServiceNow portal, we created a simple form to ensure that projects that follow the correct naming convention can be tracked on the site (for example, if international collaboration is required), and assign them an estimated monthly budget.
Collect all this data and send it to the approver, who can communicate with the requester when necessary and obtain other information needed. Only start projects when clear business needs are identified.
benefit
We are already benefiting from using the ServiceNow portal to drive cloud-based services. The time to deploy resources in the cloud has been reduced from two days to almost real-time, which means annual savings of approximately 12,000 euros.
Customer adoption and satisfaction are high. More than 600 projects have been created on the GCP platform, driven by the ServiceNow portal. In addition, because we can implement governance, the risk of uncontrolled cloud costs is greatly reduced.
Obviously, we have learned a lot in this process. To achieve the ultimate goal, tools must be adjusted. For Veolia, this is about optimizing time and resource allocation in the digital and physical fields.
Through gradual adaptation-that is, by repeatedly questioning ourselves-we can maximize the commercial value of the GCP platform.
Sustainable future
Finally, if there is no management support and solid promotion, all this is impossible. Fortunately, the reliability of ServiceNow makes it easy to adopt.
We look forward to seeing that we can expand the boundaries of the platform in the long term to help build a better, green and sustainable future.
To discover this story and other customer stories, please refer to our digital experience page Knowledge 2020.
Martin Black, head of Veolia etus ITMS Center of Excellence, Veolia Chief Cloud Solution Architect
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