SLA management is critical for large scale organizations to operate efficiently. Sodexo is a French food service and facilities management company. Sodexo is one of the world’s largest multinational corporations, with 420,000 employees representing 130 nationalities, 34,000 sites in 80 countries. Listen to the interview of Toan Nguyen and learn how the company complies with SLAs with their Partners thanks to Axway Central Governance.
Hello, my name's Toan Nguyen, and I work as an integration architect for Sodexo Belgium. This means that I'm responsible for the integration of home-made applications and also for communication with our partners for backend development. Sodexo Belgium, in terms of key figures, is 430 million euros in turnover, 4000 employees spread across 1200 sites, over 70,000 consumers and those who receive discount vouchers. Put more precisely, one in four Belgian people uses our services. Sodexo also provides services in hospitals, in catering in the corporate world, in schools, and in government.
Sodexo was using a lot of email exchanges, exchanges via the SFTP or FTPS protocol, and at that time, it was clearly a struggle to gain any insight or governance of our data flows in order to be able to both centralize them and standardize them. Having ungoverned data flows was problematic for us, for example from the point of view of the agreements that we have with our partners. We have SLAs agreed in advance; so using the example of printing circuit boards, we will therefore have in place an SLA with our partners covering the delivery terms. All the communications that we send to our partners then have to respect a clearly defined timeframe; otherwise, we face penalty charges for late delivery. We need to be able to pinpoint where the problem is, then take rapid action when an incident occurs, and also alert our partners.
So we set up the MFT environment with the help of experts and consultants, and therefore the MFT environment as a whole encompasses several products including Transfer CFT, Central Governance, Secure Transport, and Sentinel. So this project lasted around a year and a half to two years, which actually progressed over a number of phases.
We have around 20 CFTs within our infrastructure, with 50 data flows deployed; we have file transfers of up to 1 gigabyte of data and from a statistical point of view each week we have over 150 gigabytes of data sent to eight partners, although at some point in the future we would like to implement more and more data flows and also to install CFTs on several servers.
So in terms of advantages and added value, for business and technical alike, we have four: primarily (as I explained) it's for having better visibility for reporting and alerting, so that also means being able to provide reporting to the business teams and alerting to the support teams, and being able to respond rapidly when an incident occurs. The second point is in terms of responsibility; having an MFT environment makes it possible to isolate each responsibility, from the moment an incident occurs, so we know if the issue is internal to us or has occurred at the partner site. The third point covers security: within the MFT environment we use the PeSIT protocol, which provides better information on the data exchanged, so they all carry metadata that lets us pinpoint exactly when a problem arose. So, the final point is being able to standardize our data flows on a governance platform in order to be able to deploy them much more rapidly in the future.
