Canadian Dairy Industry: Azure
Executive Summary
To manage the various processes and ensure adherence, each province has an official agency – a milk board – that serves as the interface between dairy farmers and the consumer markets. Each provincial board effectively manages their supply chains with similar IT requirements. The only major difference by province is legislation.
There was a lot of IT duplication across the Canadian dairy industry. In order to address this duplication, BC Milk and seven other provincial milk boards combined to form a single IT management organization. Together, they’ve been implementing Office 365 tools, such as Power BI. Since a central team manages IT, the dairy boards can keep their attention on the dairy business, from the cows to the customers. Because they share IT expenses, they have been able to greatly reduce costs.
Business Challenge
The infrastructure, a single IT management, came with numerous requirements:
• Data sovereignty
• Specific data isolation
• A way for provinces to enter and exit if they so chose
• Scalable
• Management by a neutral third party
Benefits
After considering many alternative solutions, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), BC Milk chose Microsoft Azure.
• Azure was the best fit to meet the unique needs and requirements of the industry given that it could provide the scalability and multi-tenancy needed to ensure provincial data segregation and control.
• There is a Canadian Azure data centre, meaning that the milk boards’ data is secure in Canada. Having a Canadian Azure data center helps make customers feel safe and meet the contractual obligation to keep their data in Canada.
Solution
By leveraging key Azure services such as Azure AD, Azure Monitor, Azure Site Recovery, ProServeIT was able to design, architect and implement a robust and scalable infrastructure that meets the demands of the users and the application. The initial design of the application included a SQL IaaS component, which was subsequently migrated to SQL PaaS based on PSIT's recommendation.
Client Canadian Dairy Industry Industry Agriculture, Government Website bcmilkmarketing.worldsecuresystems.com
