Rexel – May 2024

SECURITY & CONNECTIVITY

ON THE ROAD TO

CONNECTIVITY CLOUDIFICATION

Developing innovative and sustainable solutions to respond to customer needs, security and connectivity is central to Rexel’s hybrid cloud journey

With a mission to offer customers worldwide innovative and sustainable solutions to improve the comfort, security and energy performance of installations, infrastructure and buildings, Rexel has been a major player in the professional electrical supplies distribution market in France and worldwide for more than 50 years.

In an energy world undergoing transition, Rexel develops custom solutions to respond to all its customers’ needs, every day. The company is a worldwide expert in the professional multichannel distribution of products and services for the energy world, with a revenue of €19.2bn (US$20.7bn) in 2023.

One of the main challenges Rexel faces today is staying ahead of rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats. “New threats and techniques emerge every day, so we need to continually conduct research and raise awareness on this topic,” says Pierre-Emmanuel Leriche, Group Chief Information Security Officer. Additionally, as he highlights, instilling a consistent cybersecurity culture across Rexel’s multilocal business model is an ongoing priority.

Another major challenge stems from Rexel’s multi-local business model. With entities across different regions, it can be

difficult to instil the same level of cybersecurity understanding and culture everywhere, where people have varying backgrounds when it comes to cybersecurity knowledge.

“We are actively working to build a global community around this issue,” Leriche says. “Our goal is to ensure everyone in the company is on the same page and operating with a consistent, high level of cybersecurity proficiency.”

Jye Sutton, the company’s Chief Technology Officer, highlights talent management and development on a global scale as a key challenge, along with ensuring consistency and standardisation across regions with differing technology maturity levels.

Rexel’s top priority, he explains, is maintaining stable and secure technology to support the business operations. “From this

clear mandate, two key challenges arise. One is talent management and development on a global scale and the second is ensuring consistency and standardisation across our many regions with differing maturity levels.”

Rexel frequently acquires new companies and integrating their technologies into its standardised platforms and processes poses questions.

“Do we merge them into our standards or do we keep them standalone? The overarching challenge is achieving the right balance – implementing consistent global technology standards, while still allowing flexibility to meet local business requirements as needed.

“Adapting to enable this standardisation, paired with appropriate customisation, is one of our biggest priorities today. We must get it right to move the business forward effectively worldwide.”

Jye Sutton

TITLE: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER (CTO) AND SECURITY FACTORY DIRECTOR FOR REXEL GROUP

Sutton is an innovative and results-driven Chief Technology Officer (CTO) dedicated to shaping the digital future of organisations on a worldwide scale. With his proven track record in leading transformative technology initiatives, he has successfully orchestrated the development and implementation of solutions that drive business growth and enhance operational efficiency. “My strategic vision is rooted in leveraging the right level of emerging technologies, fostering a culture of innovation and building empathetic high-performance teams that thrive in dynamic, cross-cultural environments.”

Pierre Emmanuel Leriche

TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER (CISO) FOR REXEL GROUP

Leriche, a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, currently serves as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Rexel where he leads the information security management. With a strong technical background and transversal skills, Leriche, is responsible for shaping the security strategy, risk management, governance, and security assurance at Rexel.

Passionate about knowledge sharing, Leriche, is dedicated to contributing to cybersecurity associations, conferences, and groups, where he actively imparts his experiences and insights. His professional journey began in consulting, where he spent 12 years, initially focusing on the technical aspects before transitioning to compliance and governance. For the past eight years, Leriche, has been key in leading cybersecurity efforts at Rexel, strengthening its security posture.

Unlock the Power of AI with Devoteam

Your Partner in Data-Driven Intelligence

• AI & Machine Learning

Devoteam empowers your business with the transformative capabilities of AI and machine learning. Seamlessly integrate cuttingedge technologies to elevate your operations and stay ahead in the digital era

• Tailored Solutions for Your Needs

Cloud Platforms, Cyber, AI* and Sustainability.

Born in tech, Devoteam has almost 30 years of deep expertise in guiding your business through the complexity of tech, supporting your sustainable digital transformation.

Creative tech for Better Change

*Artificial Intelligence

Whether it’s automating processes, enriching customer experiences, or optimising performance, Devoteam tailors AI solutions to meet your unique requirements

“The point of cloudification is that it’s helping us stay and be agile at scale”

BRUNO

DE LA BRETÈCHE HEAD OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR REXEL GROUP

Bruno De La Bretèche

TITLE: HEAD OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR REXEL GROUP

Bruno de la Breteche, Head of Digital Technologies at Rexel Group, believes in passion at work. Claiming more than 20 years of interest in development and 10 years of solid expertise in house, his focus is to extract the best of technology to enhance digital customer experience at large and Web, apps and customers’ experience in store. As an agile evangelist, he pushes the tech teams to innovate at the fastest pace, but also to stay extra-close to the business while fostering the industry environment with this famous motto Think Global, Act Local.

Kaya Demircigil

TITLE: HEAD OF CLOUD AND COLLABORATION FOR REXEL GROUP

Demircigil is responsible for Cloud infrastructure supporting Rexel’s digital transformation. He excels at tailoring cloud hybrid solutions alongside application and security teams to deliver business agility in digital that keeps Rexel ahead of the competition. Demircigil is not alone: he has an amazing team that supports Rexel’s global activities, allowing anything to be possible for Rexel in the digital era where excellent digital platforms are the basics.

The move to a hybrid cloud approach

As a global company, Rexel operates across 19 countries, necessitating a constant embrace of change. The centralisation of IT has enabled better security controls and economies of scale.

Kaya Demircigil, Rexel’s Head of Cloud, has witnessed Rexel’s transformation from a classical legacy IT firm to an IT company driving transformation and leveraging data.

“We need a robust IT backbone that supports the business. Because if we have problems there, it could hugely impact our revenue. We must secure those platforms and ensure they are scalable on demand and agile enough, with a fast time-to-market.

“When I joined Rexel, we started talking about these digital transformation needs. But our backbone wasn’t ready, so we moved

from a more classical legacy IT company to an IT company driving transformation and using data to improve. We’re still bulk sellers, but our backbone is that we are IT experts.”

With Rexel continuing to grow and acquiring other businesses, Sutton highlights some of the challenges to negotiate when dealing with legacy IT. “There’s a lot of legacy IT when we acquire businesses that need uplifting to operate in the modern world.

That’s one challenge we have. That’s where we start talking about hybrid networking elements – we have to look at how we do all of this securely, maintaining legacy while innovating to meet the business’s digital requirements.”

As the organisation continues to embark upon this transformation, Rexel has invested significantly in cybersecurity to keep pace

“Our goal is to ensure everyone in the company is on the same page and operating with a consistent, high level of cybersecurity proficiency”

PIERRE-EMMANUEL LERICHE CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER FOR REXEL GROUP

with the evolving threat landscape. Cloud acceleration has also been a major focus, requiring a shift from traditional perimeter security to protecting data itself via techniques like zero trust.

“The traditional ‘castle’ approach of securing the perimeter is no longer viable,” Leriche says. “We need to protect the data itself, not just how it is managed. And of course, there is identity, which ties into the journey toward a zero trust approach.”

Rexel’s cloud transformation: The end goals

For Sutton, the cloud transformation aims to establish stable, secure and modular cloud services to drive the company’s digital evolution – an ongoing journey, not a onetime project. It’s about enabling innovation while maintaining control and reversibility.

“For us, the transformation is about enabling the business. We are global business partners helping Rexel evolve in that sense. Cloud transformation is not a one-time thing, it’s something continuous.

The main point is that we are working on stable, secure and modularized services for the cloudification of everything.

“That’s not a one-shot project – it’s something ongoing. We’ll keep modularizing different elements as we move forward. We’re not moving to the cloud because the cloud is magical, but we’ll need to adapt and grow with the business.”

From an operational risk perspective, Sutton explains that Rexel aims to strike a balance when it comes to its cloud transformation. “Sometimes we need to have total control on our side. When going through security investigations that happen

in large companies, you realise the value of on-premises infrastructure and your ability to access logs in real-time to make quick decisions.

“A lot of our decisions for a hybrid approach are also protecting us in the future,” he adds. “If there is a cloud problem, that means we can manage some workloads on-premises, and have the reversibility to adapt and change to future needs.”

Leriche agrees, highlighting security’s role as an enabler rather than a blocker, facilitating the shift to the cloud while focusing on identity, data protection and cloud security posture improvements.

We are Almond, a major player in cybersecurity information systems and managed services. We are an agile and efficient one-stop-shop, offering combined expertise in cyber, cloud and infrastructure.

Our mission: accelerate your digital transformation securely and manage it.

“I think there has been a shift over the last few years – from security being seen as a blocker, to now acting as an enabler for the business. But whether it’s in the cloud or any other technology, it’s more about having the right mindset to always support the business and digital transformation, rather than the specific environment.”

Rexel at the edge of cloudification: Agility and scalability

According to Bruno de La Bretèche, Head of Digital Technologies at Rexel, one of the biggest challenges is scaling both IT and the organisation to support Rexel’s target for digital sales to reach 40% of its total revenue by 2025, all while maintaining agility. “The

point of cloudification is that it’s helping us stay and be agile at scale,” he says.

“We need to scale our organisation, but also our way of working, while staying super agile. That’s the main challenge my team faces today and I’d say it’s Rexel’s main challenge overall.”

The point of cloudification, de La Bretèche explains, is to help Rexel maintain agility at scale.

“If you want to scale, at some point you have to automate. If you want to keep agile, you have to automate,” he says. “The full DevSecOps pipeline model is impossible without automation. Now, you can start doing everything on-premises if you want, and if you have millions of engineers, or you

can use a hyperscaler to get accelerators. One point of moving to the cloud is to be able to go faster and have more accelerators. It can also make you more predictable – everything is versioned, so it’s easier to see what changed. It’s helping us be more predictable, faster to production and shortening loops.”

Demircigil underscores the cultural shift required for concepts like DevSecOps, where historically siloed teams like coders and infrastructure personnel now need to collaborate seamlessly.

“For a long time, we had teams doing coding in languages like C++ or Java and other teams creating virtual machines (VMs). Now those two cultures have to learn to work together and each side has to understand the other. This is a cultural transformation.

“Cloud transformation is not a one-time thing, it’s something continuous”

JYE SUTTON CTO AND SECURITY FACTORY DIRECTOR FOR REXEL GROUP

“When done properly and efficiently, then yes, you can have ecosystems ready in days. But if the DevSecOps across those areas can’t communicate, even in the cloud it will still take three months to get your infrastructure ready. That’s really where the infra folks had to learn to speak up and communicate with the app developers and the app developers had to learn to understand a bit about how the infrastructure works.

“That’s the biggest challenge and the only way it can succeed is getting those cultures to understand and work together seamlessly.”

Cloud transformation supporting digital solutions

For de La Bretèche, the cloud enables faster delivery cycles, reduced from sixweek releases to hourly deployments by automating processes and standardising across regions. “It helps us to go faster,” he states.

“We know our responsibility. We know we need to deliver quickly. How can we make

it happen? There is a shift. For example, before, we had a release every six weeks; now we can do a release in a few hours.”

Sutton adds that cloud solutions provide agility in launching new digital products, customising regionally and optimising workload response times closer to customers.

The evolution has driven a mindset change from pointing fingers at “innocent applications” or “guilty infrastructure” to shared accountability for streamlining choke points.

“Instead of having a one-year update on infrastructure components, we’re having major updates every quarter,” he adds. “The infrastructure side has needed to be more agile, working with the sprints, and to be current and supported on the platforms, so there’s been a big shift from that perspective.”

Partnerships with Devoteam and Almond

Collaboration with consulting partners has been invaluable for Rexel, providing diverse perspectives, skilled resources and flexibility. Devoteam supported Rexel’s early cloud journey, continuing into more mature phases, while Almond has bridged on-premises infrastructure with the cloud, ensuring robust security and connectivity solutions.

“Almond has been instrumental in supporting us with network and peripheral elements, essentially bridging our on-premise infrastructure with the cloud,” Sutton says. “They play a crucial role in ensuring the development of appropriate security measures and connectivity solutions.”

Demircigil, meanwhile, highlights Devoteam’s vital analysis and architecture role in understanding application needs

and requirements before recommending cloud adoption. “One of the big things we ask Devoteam is to analyse and create a business case – is this what we truly need and does it make sense?

“We also ask those cloud-centric people whether we sometimes need to go to the cloud at all. We don’t have a cloud-only strategy. So we need people to understand the cost of a VM in the cloud versus a data centre. Do we need the cloud’s elasticity for this project? It’s a real analysis of the use case – what will the application do, what features could use Platform as a Service instead of Infrastructure as a Service?

It’s about changing mindsets.

“We want Devoteam to bring that analysis, architecture and pattern creation, which will facilitate our business transforming to the cloud where it makes sense.”

Look to the future:

Continued cloudification

Leriche envisions a continued cloudification trend, with an emphasis on identity, data protection and cloud security posture advancement as threats evolve.

“I think this trend of moving to the cloud, which we call ‘cloudification’, will continue for a while. We don’t have a strict ‘move to cloud’ strategy – we’re building in the cloud only. As we put security barriers and measures in place, attackers will constantly try to find new ways to attack and reach their goals. So I’m envisioning a quite stable trend in cloudification based on what we’ve seen over the last few years.

“Identity and data will be critical areas of focus for the next 12-18 months,” he adds. “Threats will continue evolving as we try to secure things, so we have to stay vigilant on identity and data protection, and evolving our cloud security posture intelligently when moving to the cloud makes sense for the business.”

Sutton anticipates managing disruptors like AI, which could aid containerisation and orchestration but must be implemented securely. Greater serverless computing adoption and a focus on sustainable IT practices are also expected to shape future cloud strategies.

“There will also likely be a push towards greater serverless computing adoption. But we need to understand that serverless doesn’t mean servers disappear – we still need to look at how to secure operations. And I think this is where the developer

and coder roles are changing. They need to be more savvy about security and infrastructure, to have more of a fullstack skillset including infrastructure and security layers, to operate future cloud models.

“Then there will always be, and it will be interesting navigating, the focus on sustainability – how can we do IT sustainably? This could involve renewable data centres and many other potential approaches that may not even exist today,

to see how we can evolve sustainably.”

Rexel’s commitment to the cloud roadmap is clear, albeit with talent scarcity as an ongoing challenge given industry-wide demand. As de La Bretèche asserts, Rexel will continue along its current trajectory.

“Cloud is here to stay. I don’t think we’re going back to on-premises infrastructure. I’ve seen articles suggesting, ‘Oh, it’s too expensive now. Let’s go back on-prem,’ but I don’t think that’s the case for Rexel today. What I know from Rexel’s strategy is that, by 2025, we’ll have to reach 10% more digital revenue, the equivalent of approximately €8bn (US$8.7bn).

“Digital is our biggest platform, so we really have to support this and ensure we have the right skills, the right people and the right partners to achieve this goal.”

“We have moved from a more classical legacy IT company to an IT company driving transformation and using data to improve”

KAYA DEMIRCIGIL HEAD OF CLOUD AND COLLABORATION FOR

REXEL GROUP