Case Study: International Development Research Centre modernizes its digital platform with Microsoft Azure and open source

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

International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian federal Crown corporation, faced challenges with its outdated, unresponsive public website. The site failed to effectively highlight its research work to a global audience and was difficult for staff to manage. IDRC needed a modern, highly-optimized web platform that could deliver content across all devices and provide its internal team with easier control over content management. They partnered with Microsoft for a solution.

Microsoft, through its Azure cloud platform, provided a solution leveraging open-source technologies like Drupal, Ubuntu, and Apache. This new infrastructure delivered a flexible, scalable, and user-friendly website for both visitors and internal administrators. The results included significantly faster response times, an improved user experience, and substantial cost savings of CAD $500,000 in maintenance and CAD $50,000 in annual licensing fees over five years.

International Development Research Centre

Gilles Dupuis

Director, Information Management and Technology Division