EDF owns and operates a number of power plants and wind farms across the country, and when the new Hinkley Point C (HPC) station opens, it will provide an estimated 20% of the UK’s electricity.

Simple tools and borrowed infrastructure were not enough to support the needs of the largest construction project currently underway in Europe. HPC needed more appropriate IT to digitally enable the project. EDF understood that the quickest way to spin up its IT requirements was by leveraging the cloud to migrate existing applications and develop new solutions. To ensure the process was done properly and securely, HPC needed a trusted partner to help choose and implement its cloud platform. After exploring all of its options, the company landed on the powerful combination of Avanade and Microsoft Azure.

Avanade Advisory worked with EDF to discover and understand how Microsoft Azure cloud could be used to meet all its needs. Our team helped develop the implementation strategy and prioritise the applications that would be migrated to the cloud infrastructure using Avanade’s Cloud Foundations methodology.

We helped build the secure cloud foundation, the processes and the new servers that HPC’s document management application – TeamCentre – is hosted on and where documents will be stored for 100 years. To control access to information, including data stored in TeamCentre, we also helped build HPC’s secure cloud.

The TeamCentre application is now live in the cloud, helping to improve collaboration among HPC employees and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Avanade’s Azure Operations Center in Newcastle also provides support services for the infrastructure. We built a factory model to continue to expand the Azure platform on which Sensitive Nuclear Information (SNI) can securely sit – a world first. This model features automation and templating to accelerate deployment of new solutions and simplify support.

Technologies used: SQL on Azure, Linux servers on Azure

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