Supporting the "Go To Cloud" Program

Cloud First, an ambitious strategy

Société Générale's "Go to Cloud" program aims to rationalize and centralize the information systems of its various business units by the end of 2025, offering unified, generic cloud services across the group. The Go To Cloud (GTC) entity is responsible for delivering the full range of public cloud infrastructure services and capabilities, while supporting the group's internal clients through their transitions, including cloud-native adoption and refactoring.

To reinforce its 15-person team of systems and software architects, Société Générale brought in a Synapsys Infrastructure and Cloud Urbanist for an information systems urbanization mission. The bank chose a hybrid cloud infrastructure, using either its own private cloud or public cloud platforms, Azure and AWS, depending on client needs.

Managing technical cloud projects

The Synapsys Infrastructure and Cloud Urbanist is responsible for facilitating cloud service delivery to internal clients, handling technical project management work such as conducting studies and proposing recommendations, qualifying business requests and verifying compliance with organizational standards, labeling services according to acceptance criteria, and reviewing and optimizing architecture based on interfacing components and dependencies, including applications, access rights, networks, multi-region setups, availability zones, resilience principles, SLOs, and integration across various IS components.

Architecture workshops within a SAFe framework

Beyond the technical expert role, the Urbanist runs numerous architecture workshops with stakeholders across the organization. Société Générale uses the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) methodology to steer the GTC program, a set of principles and organizational practices designed to help large enterprises scale agile methods, improve value delivery, and accelerate transformation.

All teams collaborate during a PI Planning session held every 8 weeks over 3 days, where feature teams assess their needs against leadership direction, new technical challenges, and emerging issues. These needs feed into a roadmap and are addressed iteratively until the next PI Planning.