Usina Santa Adélia gains flexibility, robustness, and security with data center migration to Azure

Usina Santa Adélia is a traditional agricultural company. Founded in 1937, it has two plants in the cities of Jaboticabal and Pereira Barreto – both in the state of São Paulo. With approximately 3,000 employees, the company produces sugar, ethanol, and electricity, all from the same raw material: sugarcane.

In the 2020/2021 crop season, the production capacity of the company's two units was 137,000 tons of sugar, 322 million liters of ethanol, and the sale of 58.8 MWh per ton of exported sugarcane energy. Total milling was 5.8 million tons of sugarcane.

For the last ten years, Usina Santa Adélia has been undergoing a modernization process, adapting family management to an outlook focused on professionalization and the market. In 2014, the company began reviewing its technology infrastructure, undergoing a review of application architecture, SAP ERP, agro-industrial management systems, and people, among other migrations to digital, with the intention of bringing robustness and agility to the company's internal processes.

Data center migration to support production

The company's calendar is divided between the off-season period between November and March, when the raw material is planted and preventive maintenance of the industrial plant is performed, and the production period, harvesting, between April and October, when the plant operates 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

"It is a just-in-time process because sugarcane is very perishable and loses quality if cut and unprocessed. So, we don't have stock. During this period, we collect, transport, mill, and produce," explains Carlos Soldi, IT Manager at Usina Santa Adélia.

In September 2019, with the support of SGA, a Microsoft partner, it was time to review the company's on-premises data center, that was internal, low-security, and at the end of its useful life. "This opportunity has come up to look at other scenarios. That's when the partnership with SGA came in, which did an analysis of our environment and came up with the proposal to migrate to the Microsoft Cloud," Carlos says.

After conducting a series of studies analyzing scenarios, risks, and advantages, with the approval of the board, the company found Microsoft Azure to be a safe environment for migration. The decision was made in September 2019; over the next two months, there was a process of preparing the environment and the implementation took place in March 2020.

The architecture covers the entire corporate process: in addition to the system required to maintain production, it supports the management of the payment of employees, suppliers, and sales process, among others. "The implementation was well planned and took place without the need for re-installations: they deployed the agent on the source server, which replicated the data to the cloud destination server, and it was already possible to do all the validation of the environment," Carlos analyzes.

Forward-looking modernization

With the migration, Usina Santa Adélia gained the availability, flexibility, and peace of mind to work securely. Internal team familiarity with Microsoft products was also a favorable factor, accelerating the learning curve.

Armindo Sgorlon, CEO of SGA, explains that safety was the centerpiece of project design and other issues such as flexibility and economics also integrated thinking, but in terms of design, it was essential that it allowed the company to think ahead. "We are focused on infrastructure modernization, which now enables scalability, flexibility, and resilience. Usina Santa Adélia is now able to adopt other technologies and look to the future," he explains.

Integration empowers the business with more tools

Cloud infrastructure has also brought a potential for integration, connecting other tools in use at Usina Santa Adélia, such as Power BI, Power Apps, and Office 365. "Scalability, performance, ease of use, new features, integration with the tools: all of this creates a more productive and efficient work dynamic," says Carlos.

This potential was evident when the pandemic generated restrictive social measures aimed at containing the problem. Without the home office model in place, it took a few weeks to implement the platform and ensure remote work of the administrative team, as the company is classified as an essential service, did not interrupt its activities.

"We wanted a performance environment that was simple to use and with little traumatic twist. The company was able to work with these teams remotely using the cloud environment, and much of the success is that this deployment looked a lot at the user experience. If the move to the cloud had not started, we would certainly have been much more impacted in terms of employee experience," Carlos celebrates.

Intelligent cloud support to go the extra mile

Carlos assesses that the solution brought a number of benefits to Usina Santa Adélia and gave peace of mind to operate at full steam. "We have been able to improve the level of service and ensure the availability agreed with our company, as well as make the performance environment, with centralized and simplified management," he comments.

He also evaluates cost management in the cloud as positive and can provision a space with much more flexibility than would be possible in an on-premises environment, as well as the possibility of developing applications in the system.

"What motivated the migration was not digital transformation, but the good experience we had with this environment led us to pull other fronts to digital transformation, then focused on processes with more mobile tools, data analysis, diagnostic processes, and optimization. We are very happy with the path we are taking now, and the cloud is certainly a big driver of that," he concludes.