Supporting Azure Cloud Project Implementation

The role of the Cloud Center of Excellence

Saint-Gobain's Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), a 10-person team within the Cloud Factory entity, aims to help business teams implement cloud projects by guiding them toward the CCoE's Azure offerings that best fit their needs. To reinforce its architects and Cloud Success Managers (CSMs), Saint-Gobain brought in a Synapsys Cloud Solution Architect in March 2021. The CCoE operates as a trio: a Cloud Success Manager, a Cloud Solution Architect, and a SecOps engineer.

Managing cloud projects across an international scope

The Synapsys Cloud Solution Architect's role spanned an international scope at several levels: qualifying each new project through technical interviews with business stakeholders such as project managers, experts, and local IT teams, reviewing architecture schemas for consistency with Azure offerings, providing expertise and guidance on qualified Azure services, supporting usage cost estimates with a FinOps lens, and guiding business teams through project implementation in Azure.

Projects handled by the Cloud Center of Excellence ranged widely in complexity, from simple storage account setups to full e-commerce site overhauls. The Solution Architect was also responsible for qualifying Azure services against criteria such as exposure, authentication, data security, and network integration to ensure they matched business needs.

A cloud-first strategy at scale

In early 2022, Saint-Gobain accelerated its Cloud-First strategy with an ambitious roadmap to industrialize cloud usage. In pursuit of flexibility, security, and availability, the company converged on a new architecture built around hubs deployed across multiple landing zones worldwide.

This gave rise to a Public Cloud team of more than 40 people spread across CSM, Architecture, Development, Operations, PMO, FinOps, Cybersecurity, and AppDevOps functions. The Synapsys Cloud Solution Architect's role evolved into this new scope, focused on redesigning the landing zone as part of Saint-Gobain's push to industrialize its "Saint Gobain Enterprise Cloud" foundation internationally.