West Coast Reduction Ltd. (WCRL) is Western Canada’s largest rendering company, operating in six metropolitan areas, processing 1 billion pounds of material every year.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/306039473 CHALLENGE
WCRL developed a vision for the strategic use of Information Technology to deliver IT in a more robust and agile way. Cloud computing in its various forms was judged as the best way to meet this vision.
On the path to optimizing the performance of WCRL’s infrastructure, the IT team engaged Softlanding to assist in building and implementing a cloud infrastructure plan. Several platforms and processes needed to be updated:
- Disaster recovery needed to be set in place for the hundreds of applications that were used within day-to-day operations
- Uniform collaboration and information sharing needed to be adapted to accommodate the disparate information structure
- Better protection and encryption of their devices needed to secure corporate resources
SOLUTION
Stepping in to reorganize the structure of their organization, Softlanding’s managed services solution helped West Coast Reduction road-map legacy infrastructure and develop a proper disaster recovery and security stance to protect these applications.
As the first line of attack, Softlanding inventoried West Coast Reductions’ applications and systems to identify opportunities for application modernization, improved security, and business continuity in the event of an outage. Of the items identified, Softlanding helped WCRL improve on:
- Investing in Azure Site Recovery as a Disaster Recovery solution, Softlanding was able to ensure WCRL’s accounting system would be up and running when planned and unplanned outages occurred.
- Implementation of MFA and Intune for device management and conditional access – all email on devices needs to be encrypted and devices enrolled on Intune.
- Road-mapping a plan to move their ERP and DocuSign application to Azure – thus reducing the burden of staff to constantly maintain their most integral applications and enhancing system performance.
RESULTS
Flexibility and Accessibility with SaaS on Office 365
West Coast Reduction was able to transition key applications as software-as-a-service applications including personal productivity, collaboration and document management services provided through Office 365.
Improved Security and Identity Access Management
West Coast Reduction’s data is now protected in the cloud with Microsoft conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication which, through modern authentication protocols, allow federated access to non-Microsoft applications.
Freed up time for WCRL’s IT Team
WCRL’s IT team can now focus on delivering business value with robust and agile platforms provided by Office 365 and Azure.
Better Protected Applications
By adopting a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy for integral applications like WCRL’s Oracle JD Edwards ERP system, the company can relax knowing their data, apps, and workloads are up-and-running when planned and unplanned outages occur.
"The cloud is a better way to access applications, platforms, and infrastructure but is also a place where most vendors are innovating. Softlanding has been a great guide in our journey to the cloud. We’ve enjoyed many high bandwidth conversations with their consultants as we planned out and implemented a very successful transition."
Will Hopkins, CIO, West Coast Reduction Ltd.
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