Bayleaf’s gold-level expertise with Azure guarantees performance during critical, high-demand periods, while providing economical efficiency during normal times

The move to Azure cloud services allowed WorkSafe to handle the exponential growth in traffic generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. By leveraging Autoscaling to meet the site’s elastic demands as the primary source for the province’s safety protocols, re-opening plans, and other safety information, WorkSafe played a pivotal role in restarting the economy.

Client Name

WorkSafeBC

hosting

Services

  • Requirements & Strategy
  • UI & UX Design
  • Content Management System Implementation & Integration
  • Taxonomy & Content Strategy
  • Managed Services & Support

Technologies

  • Sitecore Experience Platform
  • Azure Search
  • Azure Infrastructure
  • Custom Taxonomy Implementation

Client Needs

After reviewing the cost, risks, and technological benefit of moving to cloud services, WorkSafeBC was ready to make the shift, however they required the migration from on-site servers to Azure to happen quickly. Concerned that any outage or service slowdown would impact businesses across BC needing to access mission critical information during the Covid pandemic, they trusted Bayleaf to manage both the migration and Azure services.

Our Solutions

STRATEGIC MIGRATION

A long-time partner with Bayleaf, WorkSafe entrusted their migration to our Gold Certified engineers. As WorkSafe had a huge amount of data that needed to migrate and be indexed within a short time, Bayleaf leveraged Azure’s ability to scale resources for additional compute, storage, and network services, ensuring the site’s availability and performance during and after the migration.

The challenge in migration was to quickly index its vast data for the search function to work. This was accomplished by greatly increasing the SQL data base resources for a specific duration. Once the migration and indexing were complete, Bayeaf scaled resources back to normal levels to save the client money. In planning the migration and proper scaling, Bayleaf developed and rigorously tested the process before deployment. Determining appropriate scale is important to prevent overspending on unused infrastructure services or when traffic spikes, knowing how much to increase to, to meet performance demands.

MEETING THE DEMAND

With COVID’s rapidly shifting landscape, Bayleaf was on hand to assist and monitor with APP Autoscaling when unprecedented traffic flooded the site with employers and employees seeking workplace protocol information. Being on Azure cloud made it faster and easier for WorkSafeBC to meet the spiking demands whenever new Covid-19 safety steps and regulations were announced.

As an official host of BC’s Restart plan, WorkSafe serves as a centralized location for all employment Covid resources. Azure goes beyond meeting traffic demands; the implementation of Azure Search allows users to find relevant content and resources fast. The faceted search capability helps users refine search criteria, to get at the most relevant results for their needs. Read more about WorkSafe’s Azure Search.

MANAGED SERVICES

Other Azure services WorkSafe employs are:

  • Azure Web Apps for running web and api applications
  • SQL Database, eliminating the need to maintain physical SQL environments
  • Front Door load balancing to handle usage spikes
  • Azure Cognitive Search
  • MS Defender for increased and faster cloud protection

For further information on this project please read about Search and CMS implementation.