Back in Feburary of 2014, Dassault Systèmes introduced a disruptive change to how we go to market by putting 3DEXPERIENCE Platform on the cloud. That could be a scary prospect if you are not familiar with either why we did this or how we are securing your collaboration on the cloud, so the intention here is to provide a light introduction and point you to some materials that could help make you reassured.

Introducing the 3DEXPERIENCE on the Cloud

Let’s start with a quote from Bernard Charlès from July 2013:

The cloud is a way of working. It is where consumers voice their needs, their ideas, their feedback. It is where innovation is fostered and ideas take hold. The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform reveals and delivers that potential. It gives our customers a holistic, unified view of their business and ecosystem to create better experiences for their end-consumers.

What I feel Bernard is trying to say is that by de-coupling experience creation from a static On Premise deployment, we are able to offer 3DEXPERIENCE Platform in a software-as-a-service manner using elastic cloud-based resources. This allows for better social interaction between producers and consumers, more mobility for users of the platform, and significant reductions in the Total Cost of Ownership for the solution.

A Definition of Cloud Computing

But what is the difference between this and, say, massive virtualisation by VMware or hosting services you may ask? Laurent Seror, CEO of Outscale, one of our cloud providers, used the following analogy:

Comparing Cloud Computing to hosting services and VMware is like comparing how cars were originally made piece by piece to the assembly lines in the first Ford factories. Cloud Computing industrialises IT processes and automates a maximum of tasks.

This means that you waste far less time deploying and administering the IT system, and more time leveraging it to your advantage in experience creation.

The Cloud and Security

When companies consider moving to the cloud, security is always a major concern. At Dassault Systèmes, we recognise several layers of security requirements in our Security in Depth philosophy. Described in our free Cloud Security Whitepaper, we add levels of security end-to-end to give our users a maximum of security during their entire experience. We also leverage the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as a yardstick to ensuring that state-of the-art anti-piracy and anti-hacking technologies are embedded in the platform.