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Estimated reading time: 3 min 76 s

Médiamétrie began to integrate its IT and data activities into the cloud several years ago. This evolution was in response to media market dynamics, as well as the ever-increasing volumes of data for processing, which occasionally varied unpredictably. Growing use of the cloud led to the creation of a FinOps architect role to take charge of the financial optimisation that is essential for the economic performance of the cloud, and for controlling costs for customers.

Agility, security and cloud-first strategy

Médiamétrie's decision to use the cloud was based primarily on an agility rationale. Media market trends require Médiamétrie to be highly adaptive in order to anticipate the needs of the market. Médiamétrie is developing state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies for audience measurement. In addition, occasionally unforeseen variations in media consumption and in the volume of data for collection mean that we must be able to react quickly. For example, when the French President addressed the nation during the lockdowns, TV consumption and internet streaming peaked at very high rates. With the cloud, it was possible to instantly adjust resources to needs, known as “scalability” in IT jargon. It would be economically unfeasible to buy servers capable of responding to such peak loads, whereas with the cloud we only need to pay when the resources are used.

According to Sadok Arouba, Production Architect at Médiamétrie, "Optimal use of the cloud requires adaptation of the organisation and working methods, as well as sound operational management". Médiamétrie is implementing a cloud-first strategy, which consists of developing applications directly in the cloud, as opposed to the “lift and shift” model of importing elements into the cloud once they have been developed. Architecture design, development and testing are performed in the Cloud. The architectures are perfectly designed and adapted, referred to as "cloud native" or "cloud compliant".

Data security is another critical challenge in cloud use, and Médiamétrie places the protection of personal data as its highest priority. In particular, the teams leverage their mastery of technology and best practices in cloud use to guarantee data security. Regular simulations are used to train the teams, such as the Game Day held in January 2022 in collaboration with AWS. This exercise put Médiamétrie's teams to the test under a real-life cyber-attack scenario, engaging their skills on access security, data encryption, intrusion response and data recovery. According to the AWS experts, Médiamétrie's teams demonstrated an excellent mastery of, and maturity in cloud technologies, and even more so on data security in the cloud.

FinOps by design

Given the virtually unlimited access to resources, use of the cloud must be tightly managed in order to maintain business competitiveness and cost control for Médiamétrie's customers.

FinOps by design involves integrating the FinOps approach, starting at the architecture design phase. That is why FinOps recommendations are included in the Technical Architecture Files, namely the outline and characteristics of the planned architecture. Technologies are selected based on their ability to closely meet requirements and optimise costs. This architecture makes it possible to have upstream cost visibility, and therefore, helps us to choose the optimum architecture from the outset.

The FinOps approach in Médiamétrie accurately tracks the costs of using the cloud. This is done by tagging resources by activity (Médiamat, streaming, etc.), by level of the application chain (collection, pre-processing, processing, reporting), or at a more detailed level if required. In 2021, almost all (99%) of the most used and most costly resources were tagged.

Finally, tagging also enables the automatic suspension of certain non-production resources (development or tests) to be scheduled whenever these are not in use, for example, overnight and on weekends. This is referred to as autostop. In this way, 95% of resources outside of production work in autostop mode. This cuts down on unnecessary cloud use, leading to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

This mechanism is part of a set of actions to optimise costs and uses of the cloud within the framework of FinOps activity. Anticipating needs makes it possible to reserve and pay upfront (at a lower cost) for the appropriate resources. Untagged or unused resources are deleted automatically. Using algorithms, alerts are set based on budget thresholds for a given service, a given tag, or if abnormal costs are detected.

According to Sadok Arouba: "FinOps is a real-world example of "pay-as-you-go". In addition to the agility that is essential in our environment, thanks to these optimisations, Médiamétrie has achieved savings of more than 20% of the cloud cost in 2021, three times greater than in 2020. These are two strong elements of a reliable and competitive offering for our customers. That is the reason behind our objective to switch 100% of our business to the cloud by 2023."

Drawing on its experience and the excellent results of its FinOps activity, Médiamétrie was selected by AWS to give feedback on its FinOps strategy at the AWS Summit Paris in the Palais des Congrès in Paris on 12 April.

Laure Osmanian Molinero