How Great Place To Work secures its data with a sovereign cloud
Measuring employee trust at scale
Its approach is based on a simple idea: trust is a key driver of performance and engagement at work. To measure this trust, Great Place To Work relies on a research-based methodology and a standardised questionnaire designed to assess employee experience.
The collected responses enable organisations to:
- identify strengths and areas for improvement
- benchmark their results against their industry
- guide their HR strategy using concrete data
At the core of this model lies a critical element: data directly collected from employees’ perceptions.
Our mission is to evaluate the employee experience of our clients in order to help them improve it.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO, Great Place To Work France
In this context, data reliability and confidentiality are essential to the credibility of the service.
Data at the core of the Great Place To Work model
Great Place To Work surveys are built on a fundamental principle: allowing employees to express themselves freely and anonymously. The responses feed analyses that help organisations improve their work environment and management practices. This approach is based on a structured methodology, relying on around sixty questions designed to assess different dimensions of trust within an organisation.
For Great Place To Work teams, data is therefore the foundation of their entire activity.
Data is very important: without data, there is no analysis, no comparison with the industry, no way to measure progress from one survey to another. In short: no data, no added value.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
Survey responses are collected through Great Place To Work’s global tools. The French teams then use their own analysis and reporting tools to make results accessible to client organisations. In this context, hosting infrastructure becomes a key component of the overall value chain.
Data hosting: why Great Place To Work chose Clever Cloud
Great Place To Work France has been using Clever Cloud since 2018 to host part of its applications. Choosing an infrastructure provider is not just a technical decision. It also plays a role in building trust with client organisations.
These organisations rely on Great Place To Work to handle data related to employee perception, and expect strong guarantees in terms of security and confidentiality.
Our clients are increasingly demanding. It is essential for us to show them that they can trust us.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
Several factors help explain the choice of Clever Cloud.The first relates to data sovereignty. The ability to host applications on a French cloud is a key factor for corporate clients who wish to ensure that their data remains within the European regulatory framework.
The fact that it is a French hosting provider enabling data to be hosted in France is one of the decisive factors.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
The second criterion concerns infrastructure security. ISO 27001:2022 and HDS (Health Data Hosting) certifications, along with the technical guarantees associated with the hosting service, help to reinforce the platform’s credibility with corporate clients.
Finally, operational simplicity also played a decisive role. As Great Place To Work France’s technical team is relatively small, the aim was to minimise the complexity involved in managing the infrastructure as much as possible.
The size of our development team makes it more essential than elsewhere to eliminate any unnecessary complexity.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
Operating a PaaS with a small technical team
Today, the technical teams rely on Clever Cloud primarily through automation. Deployments are automatically triggered when code is pushed to the Git repository, significantly simplifying production workflows and reducing manual intervention.
This approach helps:
- streamline deployments
- reduce human error
- accelerate delivery cycles
The team also runs its own monitoring tools on the platform, providing a global view of application health and enabling faster incident detection. In practice, Clever Cloud allows Great Place To Work teams to focus on their applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Continuous deployments with minimal operational effort
Some Clever Cloud features are particularly valuable in day-to-day operations. This is especially true for Blue-Green Deployment, which enables safer and more efficient release processes.
Support for Blue-Green deployment is a good example of a differentiating feature of Clever Cloud: it works without any configuration on our side, which is not the case with other providers.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
This capability allows teams to deliver updates continuously with very little effort, while reducing risks associated with production releases. The platform also supports both vertical and horizontal scalability, which currently meets the organisation’s growth needs.
Advice from Nicolas Moreau to CIOs
For organisations considering moving to a sovereign cloud, Nicolas Moreau recommends starting with experimentation.
Try it. The price-to-quality ratio is very good. Docker support allows you to get started without taking major risks. The wide range of supported tools will likely cover your needs, even if your company does not use Docker.
Nicolas Moreau, CIO of Great Place To Work France
According to him, the key is to choose an infrastructure that genuinely simplifies day-to-day operations, allowing teams to focus on what matters most: product and value delivery.
Infrastructure as a foundation for trust
For Great Place To Work, infrastructure is not just a technical layer. It directly contributes to the trust placed in the organisation by both clients and survey participants. Security, sovereignty and reliability all play a role in ensuring that collected data is handled in a transparent and controlled environment.
In a model where data reflects employee perception, this trust is fundamental.By relying on a sovereign cloud and a PaaS platform designed for simplicity, Great Place To Work teams can focus on their core mission: analysing data and helping organisations improve employee experience over time.