Digital transformation has become a defining challenge for modern enterprises, with cloud migration evolving from a simple infrastructure change to a strategic imperative. Organizations today are looking to exit legacy data centers and gain the advantages of cloud to accelerate their operations.
Recognizing this challenge, Sopra Steria, a leading European technology consulting firm and AWS Advanced Tier Partner, has emerged as a key partner for enterprises seeking to navigate this complex journey. By developing innovative, people-centered approaches to cloud migration, they help transform technological challenges into opportunities for organizational growth and adaptation.
Story highlights
- Engagement from 150 stakeholders across business and technical domains
- Elimination of travel requirements through hybrid participation model
- Up to one week saved in workshop preparation time
- 70% faster insight generation through AI-powered theme grouping
Client Challenge: Balancing Cloud Migration with Organizational Adaptability
For Sopra Steria’s enterprise customers, cloud migration represents more than a technology replacement—it’s about building long-term organizational adaptability. One particular client faced this challenge while transitioning from significant on-premises infrastructure investments to AWS cloud solutions, with the goal of responding faster to business demands and accelerating innovation.
HĂĄkon Eriksen Drange, Principal Cloud Architect and AWS Ambassador in Sopra Steria, identified several key risks that could emerge from a hasty or poorly planned migration:
- Potential migration wave stagnation
- Unforeseen bottlenecks
- Complications arising from complex legacy environment integrations
- Potential disruptions across interconnected domains and services
To address these concerns, Sopra Steria implemented a dynamic Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) workshop designed to:
- Ensure comprehensive stakeholder engagement from the beginning
- Give all potentially affected teams a platform to voice concerns
- Identify potential risks early in the transformation journey
- Develop a measured, phased modernization strategy
The underlying objective was to help the client build capacity for rapid business response while maintaining stability in their existing infrastructure—balancing transformation with operational continuity.
Solution: Hybrid Cloud Adoption Framework Workshop
Approach
Sopra Steria implemented an innovative hybrid workshop using an AWS CAF template in Miro, transforming what could have been a slow, disjointed process into a highly engaging and collaborative experience. This approach delivered significant advantages by:
- Creating an inclusive, collaborative environment via a hybrid model that broke down traditional silos
- Lowering participation barriers through the use of customer-specific templates
- Facilitating richer conversations that would be impossible in conventional meeting formats
The result was unprecedented engagement: A total of 150 stakeholders across business, technical, and operational domains participated—something that would have been impossible in a traditional workshop. According to Sopra Steria, without Miro’s collaborative platform, both participation numbers and input quality would have been significantly lower, resulting in critical gaps in alignment and understanding.
Key Workshop Features
- Pre-Workshop Preparation: Two-week open input collection period
- Hybrid Participation: Enabled remote and in-person engagement
- Anonymous Feedback: Used Miro’s Private Mode to encourage candid input
- AI-Powered Insights: Leveraged Miro AI to accelerate theme grouping by approximately 70%, significantly reducing manual workshop tasks
- Direct Action Planning: Integrated Jira for immediate task creation
Impact: Transforming Cloud Migration through Collaborative Engagement
The workshop transformed the organization’s approach to cloud migration by creating broad alignment between teams and establishing a shared understanding of priorities and challenges.
“One of the biggest benefits we’ve seen is that there is now a better connection between business and technology,” explains Drange. “By aligning cloud transformation with business strategy, we avoided roadblocks and took a more proactive approach—anticipating system changes, integration needs, and procurement timelines well in advance.”
This collaborative approach directly addressed critical risks like migration wave stagnation, which could have resulted in increased cognitive load on technical teams, costly “double bubble” infrastructure environments, and missed deadlines triggering expensive software & hardware refreshes.
With input from 150 stakeholders across diverse domains, the process revealed crucial insights into financial and operational challenges – potentially saving millions of dollars should the company meet the 4-year migration deadline.
Collaborative Advantage
By leveraging Miro’s collaborative platform, Sopra Steria transformed what would typically be a targeted, on-site activity for a smaller audience into a cohesive, engaging process that brought together diverse perspectives and expertise. This people-centered approach has established a new benchmark for cloud migration planning that standardizes workshop facilitation, minimizes administrative overhead, and creates a scalable, repeatable migration readiness framework for Sopra Steria.
