Case Study: International Development Research Centre (IDRC) achieves a fast, mobile‑friendly global website and CAD$550,000 in cost savings with Microsoft Azure

Canadian federal Crown Corporation taps open source and Microsoft Azure to power digital platform

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian federal Crown Corporation that funds research in developing countries, needed a modern, responsive public website and an easier back-end for global content management. Its legacy SharePoint 2010 site was slow, not mobile-friendly, hard to update, and could not reliably serve audiences or stakeholders across multiple regions and devices.

Working with partner FCV Interactive, IDRC rebuilt its platform on Microsoft Azure using open source technologies (Drupal, Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, Puppet, etc.), migrating roughly 8,000 content items and 500 user stories and launching the new site in about five months. The cloud-based solution improved performance and scalability, simplified content management, enabled faster deployments, and delivered significant savings—approximately CAD$50,000 per year in licensing and CAD$500,000 in maintenance over five years—while supporting additional microsite projects.

International Development Research Centre

Gilles Dupuis

Director, Information Management and Technology Division