PARIS, December 7, 2022 - CERP Rouen, a subsidiary of Astera, a cooperative group of pharmacists, announces it is migrating workloads to the cloud with support from Kyndryl (NYSE: KD), the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services.
Astera is a French cooperative group of pharmacists that offers solutions for the development of the pharmacy. Through CERP Rouen, it is currently the second largest pharmaceutical wholesaler in France in terms of market share (21.3%), with 7,500 pharmacies supplied in France and 32,000 products listed.
With a growing business, but government-regulated rates, the IT department of Astera decided to upgrade its mainframe IT infrastructure, while optimizing its costs, by moving workloads to the cloud under a five-year project with Kyndryl that started in July 2021.
In this context, Kyndryl supported CERP Rouen and the entire Astera Group in the migration of applications (Internet sites, ordering system, company directory, financial management) to the cloud to provide more flexibility, services and to prepare its future application transformations. This migration also allows to rationalize and secure its IT infrastructure. Kyndryl also secured the maintenance in operational condition (MCO) of the dispatcher's platforms, thus allowing the teams to diversify their skills on services with higher added value.
Optimization of IT infrastructures and cyber-resilience
By migrating applications to the cloud, Kyndryl has allowed Astera Group companies to free themselves from complex IT management and reduce costs. With the cloud-based workload, Astera-CERP Rouen can now provision machines according to its real needs and to ensure an efficient disaster recovery plan, which allows the Group to save 20% of annual expenses.
Kyndryl also has enabled Astera-CERP Rouen to increase its IT security. While the group's two datacenters were previously located only a few kilometers apart, the production infrastructure is now located in France and the recovery infrastructure in Germany. This new infrastructure enables the Group to carry out disaster recovery plans via a sandbox on a perimeter of over 350 VMs. The Group has also been equipped with additional servers to ensure cyber resilience with an accelerated recovery time. The frequency of backups is increased and located at multiple sites, increasing data security.
"The mission of the information systems department is to build a modern, secure and efficient infrastructure and to become the strategic partner of the business teams. Kyndryl's comprehensive cloud offering now provide us with all the building blocks to ensure seamless service continuity and enable us to produce high value-added digital services for our customers," said Christophe Plessis, CIO of Astera - CERP Rouen.
"We are delighted with the success of this migration which allows Astera to benefit from a reliable, optimal and secure IT infrastructure. As a trusted partner, we accompany the Astera Group and its companies in their digital transformation to offer their employees and customers more innovative services," said Philippe Roncati, President of Kyndryl France.
A more sustainable future thanks to the cloud
Like many companies, Astera‘s IT department is facing a shortage of skills. One of the next steps in the collaboration between Kyndryl and Astera will be to modernize business applications and strengthen skills on the latest technological innovations.
From now on, Astera has access to the entire cloud catalog, with faster, secure and resilient delivery of new services. In the application transformation that the group wishes to pursue in the future, this new infrastructure will enable it to create cloud-native applications and to use SaaS / PaaS services or platforms. The group will thus be able to modernize its application assets and, in a second phase, digitalize its relationship with pharmacists.
About Kyndryl
Kyndryl (NYSE: KD) is the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. The Company designs, builds, manages and modernizes the complex, mission-critical information systems that the world depends on every day. For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com.
Press Contact Kyndryl: press@kyndryl.com
