Eiffage (Cédric Jublot on the image) has won the Innovation Award at the Digital Finance Awards 2025, by presenting the operational continuity solution developed with Astran, ensuring Finance vital processes running, no matter what.
Background
Eiffage, a leading European construction and concessions group, generates approximately €97 million in revenue per working day, with over 29,000 employees in France and 55,000 worldwide . In May 2022, faced with an evolving threat landscape; from sophisticated ransomware and Log4J-style vulnerabilities to geopolitical instability; Eiffage’s Executive Committee asked a critical question:
“When our IT goes down, are we ready to continue?”
Traditional business continuity plans (BCPs) often rely on static documents no/low operational data and aren’t designed for real-world execution when systems are offline. Eiffage recognized that rebuilding IT (detection, containment, restoration, testing) typically takes an average of 21 days, during which operations, and revenue, come to a standstill.
Challenges & Impacts
- Systemic IT dependency: A total IT blackout halts critical processes: no supplier orders, no payroll, no site progress.
- Financial exposure: Two weeks of downtime at €97 million/day equates to nearly €1.36 billion at risk in direct revenue loss alone.
- Operational and reputational fallout: Project delays, contractual penalties, strained supplier relationships, social tension, and long-term shareholder value erosion.
- Insurance gaps: Cyber insurance limits rarely cover such immense losses or the secondary impacts of prolonged crisis.
Solution: Astran AlwaysReady® Platform
To shift from theoretical plans to executable, data-driven continuity, Eiffage partnered with Astran to implement Eiffage Continuum, a rapid, iterative approach anchored in live, vital data and guided workflows.
Key Components
- Data Sanctuarization: Continuous fragmentation, encryption, and distribution of supplier payment and employee payroll data across multiple cloud providers, ensuring no single point of failure.
- Executable Workflows: Step-by-step interfaces that guide finance teams through supplier payments and payroll processes, with full audit trails, anti-fraud controls, and regulatory compliance baked in.
- AI-Accelerated Design: Astran’s embedded AI accelerates workflow creation, minimizing manual configuration and time-to-operational readiness.
- Readiness Dashboard: A single pane of glass displaying real-time process health, data freshness, and risk exposure, scalable to additional functions (Treasury, IT/Cyber Ops, M&A, Supply Chain).
Implementation & Timeline
- May 2022: Project kickoff and design workshops .
- Day 1: Manual access to vital data (supplier and payroll) enabled.
- +2 weeks: Automation deployed and tested in production, ready for immediate activation upon any IT outage .
- Since: IA-driven process modeling and horizontal rollout to new business functions (example “golden backup” Active Directory copies and IT Ops processes)
Results & Return on Experience
- Rapid, Agile BCP: Transformed a months-long waterfall program into a lean, iterative readiness cycle; achieving first-use operational capability in under two weeks.
- Hundreds of Millions Mitigated: Immediate reduction of direct revenue risk and secondary impacts through pragmatic, live-data continuity.
- Simplified Simulation & Testing: Crisis simulations can now be scheduled, executed, and fully traced in minutes; boosting confidence and auditability.
- Stress-Free Crisis Mode: Business users switch to Astran workflows seamlessly while IT restores systems, eliminating manual workarounds and chaos.
- Framework Integration: Native alignment with existing BIAs, risk heatmaps, and audit frameworks; leveraging prior investments.
Looking Ahead
Eiffage Continuum’s success in Finance paves the way for:
- Vertical Scaling: Enhanced Treasury processes (cash forecasts, debt payments…).
- Horizontal Expansion: Vital functions such as IT/Cyber Ops, Supply Chain, and R&D.
- AI-Driven Assistance: Future iterations will deliver proactive guidance (“Your TMS is down—here’s the XML file, validated and ready to send. Shall I guide you through the next steps?”), turning resilience into a true business capability; and Live Daily usage.
- Daily Usage: Not only for Resilience usage, Platform is already used for M&A processes.
By making operational resilience and efficiency core to every workflow, and ready to activate within the first hour of a crisis, Eiffage has’t just delivered a platform; Eiffage instilled a continuity-driven mindset that reflects their own DNA and will stand strong in an ever-more unpredictable world.
