"With Cloud Temple, we now have the right partner at our side to support us in our development and enable us to offer our local authorities, both shareholders and beneficiaries, the level of services they expect, in terms of both functional richness and operational performance".
Olivier Roullé, General Secretary of the AFL
About Agence France Locale (AFL)
Founded in 2015, AFL has the unique distinction of being the only French banking institution created by the local world. Its mission is based on a principle of general interest, while local authorities are its sole shareholders and beneficiaries. Since its creation, the financial credit institution has granted nearly €5 billion in loans to more than 400 local authorities, and has been selected in 8 out of 10 tenders in which it participates. With its sole establishment based in Lyon and around thirty employees, AFL has chosen to deploy an extremely light and agile operational structure, with a strong focus on the digitalisation of its activities.
"Our light, fully outsourced operation is a real asset for AFL's employees and our shareholders, both in terms of performance and cost optimisation".
Olivier Roullé
The issues
Already working with Micropole on the Azure side, the project with Cloud Temple was built up gradually after the bank expressed the need in 2019 to enlist the skills of a single partner capable of handling the supervision of its entire infrastructure: networks, hardware and applications.
An initial outsourcing and supervision project for the Office 365 suite and Sharepoint, Microsoft's collaborative web solution, was carried out by Cloud Temple, which was entrusted with the entire outsourcing of the system from 2020 onwards.
"In 2019, we decided to embark on a major overhaul of our entire technical infrastructure, with the aim of enabling our staff to connect remotely to all our business applications under the same secure conditions as at AFL's head office in Lyon. The choice of a single partner was quickly made for obvious reasons of simplicity, efficiency, security and cost optimisation. Cloud Temple was therefore chosen, with Micropole acting as a subcontractor to their teams".
Olivier Roullé
This choice paid off handsomely during the COVID-19 health crisis, when all AFL employees were able to carry out their activities from home, with no loss of access to the resources of the AFL Information System.
The solution
Since summer 2020, the AFL has signed an IAAS-type contract with Cloud Temple Temple, which has taken the lead in cloud matters. This framework contract enables the banking establishment to benefit from recurring, high value-added outsourcing services, as well as 'à la carte' support in terms of architecture development consultancy, expertise and skills transfer.
"Our aim is to rationalise and eventually migrate the last resources still hosted on the private cloud to our Azure public cloud, while working in good synergy with all the business publishers involved in the deployment of applications. For example, we are working closely with Orchestrade, which provides the AFL with a risk management and trading platform capable of supervising the various BI processes.
Julien Hue, account manager at Cloud Temple
It should be noted that today, the AFL's entire infrastructure is virtualised and managed in the cloud, with 60% of applications still hosted in the private cloud and 40% in the Microsoft Azure public cloud.
The benefits
In addition to Cloud Temple's ability to take into account the AFL's business and organisational issues (particularly those related to its size), the bank particularly appreciated the outsourcer's high level of expertise and technological mastery in the development, transformation, hosting and outsourcing of critical applications in the Azure cloud.
In concrete terms, there were several reasons for its choice:
- Precise sizing of the resources required for each application, with pay-as-you-go pricing
- For 'permanent' resources, a long-term commitment ensuring more aggressive pricing from Microsoft
- The eventual elimination of servers, replaced by native Azure functions such as update servers
- The close relationship that quickly developed between the parties
- Cloud Temple's ability to commit to high service level agreements (SLAs) in line with the requirements imposed on financial institutions by the European Banking Authority.
"With Cloud Temple, we now have the right partner at our side to support us in our development and enable us to offer our employees and shareholders the level of services they expect, in terms of both functional richness and operational performance."
Olivier Roullé