Case Study: Fernridge achieves scalable, secure Africa-wide data intelligence with Microsoft Azure

Fernridge Solutions Innovates with AfricaEye

Fernridge, a South African research house and subsidiary of Fernridge Consulting, needed a reliable, affordable way to deliver demographic and retail research across Sub-Saharan Africa. Its existing portal was unstable, had limited geographic coverage, on-premise hosting, and only allowed data updates every six months, making it hard to serve a global market. Microsoft Corporation, using Azure App Service as part of the Azure platform, was brought in to support the new AfricaEye business intelligence portal.

Microsoft Corporation helped implement AfricaEye as a scalable, secure online system for uploading, managing, and reporting on research data in real time. The solution expanded coverage to all of South Africa and 82 cities across Africa, centralized more than 20 million records in Azure, and added advanced search, reporting, and admin controls. Fernridge gained faster response times, improved data quality, on-demand scalability, and lower-cost, more secure storage.

Fernridge

Ilse van der Merwe

Executive