With its  positive experiences with Office 365, RioCan wanted to further leverage a cost-effective, scalable, and secure Cloud platform. To do so, the company turned its attention to Azure and decided to create a basic replica domain controller (DC) in an Azure virtual machine (VM). RioCan wanted this project to provide its IT staff with valuable experience and training with the Azure platform.

• Improved Security: The Azure environment extended advanced security to RioCan’s AD environment.

• Reduced Cost: Azure provided a low-cost platform for VMs, particularly for the test SQL server. Future servers will not have to be implemented as physical machines.