According to a Citrix report published in 2024, one in four companies plans to repatriate part of its workload from the public cloud back to on-premise infrastructure. This figure speaks volumes: the all-cloud approach, long perceived as the ideal solution, is now showing its limits. It no longer fully meets current challenges regarding sovereignty, security, cost control, and reversibility.
At QuickSign, this realization is nothing new. As early as 2020, we made a strategic choice: adopt a hybrid infrastructure, combining private cloud, public cloud… and a key technological building block: SDI (Software Defined Infrastructure). A structural decision born from an in-depth analysis of the market’s two extreme approaches.
On-premise vs public cloud: two opposing visions
On one hand, on-premise relies on a logic of total control. Data and applications are hosted directly in the company’s data centers. This approach offers real advantages: maximum sovereignty, enhanced security, more predictable costs. But it also has its flaws: lack of flexibility, difficulty in scaling up, heavy and non-scalable operational management.
Conversely, the public cloud, offered by hyperscalers like AWS or Google Cloud, relies on maximum agility. It allows companies to access ready-to-use, on-demand services with continuous updates and an unbeatable time-to-market. However, this solution also comes with friction points: increased supplier dependency, complex reversibility, sometimes unpredictable costs, and low control over data location.
Why QuickSign chose… neither of the two
Since our creation in 2010, we have experimented with both models. And our conclusion is clear: full on-prem is too rigid, while full cloud strictly lacks sovereignty. We therefore chose a third path, better suited to our security, performance, and scalability challenges.
Our response revolves around a private cloud hosted by a hyperscaler, reinforced by a fundamental technological layer: Software Defined Infrastructure.
SDI, or how to manage your infra like a smart home
SDI allows the entire infrastructure to be managed via software. Concretely, this means that resource provisioning, service orchestration, and environment management can be done in an automated, centralized, and remote manner.
“It’s like switching from manual heating in every room… to a smart home app that manages the whole house.” – Nicolas Girardi, Head of Production at QuickSign
Thanks to this approach, we gained agility, improved our cost control, all while maintaining strong sovereignty over our data and security.
A concrete example: the iPhone effect and express scaling
During the release of a new iPhone, our activity volumes experienced a sudden peak because many consumers were looking to apply for consumer credit to finance their purchase – and thus unknowingly using the QuickSign service.
In a traditional context, this scale-up would have required several weeks of adaptation. With our hybrid architecture and SDI-managed infrastructure, we were able to provision the necessary resources in less than two hours, without any service disruption or slowdown. A gain in time, but also a guarantee of resilience and operational performance.
Conclusion: a hybrid model, but an evolving one
At QuickSign, we didn’t want to choose between sovereignty and innovation. That is why we designed a hybrid infrastructure intended to offer the best of both worlds: the robustness and control of the private cloud, the flexibility and speed of the public cloud, combined with the intelligent orchestration of SDI.
But this solution is not set in stone. As Nicolas emphasizes: “It’s the best solution for us today, but we remain on the lookout for best practices.”
Because when it comes to infrastructure, the status quo is never an option.
