Case Study: George Weston Limited achieves high-availability, fast Office 365 access with F5 Networks

George Weston Optimizes Office 365 Deployment Using F5 Application Delivery Controllers

George Weston Limited, a major Canadian food processor and distributor, wanted to migrate its workforce to Microsoft Office 365 to simplify collaboration and eliminate cumbersome VPN and multiple-login requirements for global employees. The company needed to ensure continuous availability of on‑premises Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) for Office 365 authentication and had a tight deployment timeline. To meet these needs GWL selected F5 Networks and its BIG-IP solutions (BIG-IP LTM and BIG-IP GTM) with assistance from F5 Professional Services.

F5 Networks deployed BIG-IP LTM pairs in front of ADFS and ADFS proxy servers in primary and perimeter networks and BIG-IP GTM for DNS resiliency and automatic cross‑site failover, enabling centralized ADFS management and disaster recovery. The solution allowed a rapid Office 365 cutover (equipment arrived in January 2013 and the rollout was completed within weeks), ensured high availability of mission‑critical services, eliminated the need for multiple global ADFS deployments, and scaled to support GWL’s 16,000 Office 365 users today with capacity for up to 32,000.

George Weston Limited

Mirek Glowacki

Senior Manager of Infrastructure Technology Group