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SoftwareOne case study
How the cloud enables Sakata to promote collaborative work
Sakata Vegetables Europe, a Sakata Seed Corporation (Japan) subsidiary, selects, produces, and markets high-quality vegetable and flower seeds.
These are intended for farmers, seedling producers, food industries, and distributors in more than 90 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The company offers more than 900 varieties of broccoli, tomato, squash, watermelon, cabbage, cauliflower, melon, cucumber, to name just a few of its species.
Sakata Seed Corporation is a world leader in vegetable and flower seeds, and has been a key player in this market since 1913. The company employs more than 2,400 people in 22 countries.
The challenge
For any international company today, it is essential to deploy the strength of Cloud computing to better facilitate and assist their employees as they carry out their work. Sakata Vegetables had this fact in mind when they approached SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) for help.
The objective was simple: Sakata wanted to equip itself with an agile, cloud-based information system that fully secures its data worldwide and allows its members to work efficiently and collaboratively in the same space.
To implement the project, Benoit Demuth, Account Manager at SoftwareOne, called on two cloud architects. He explains how the project developed:
- Client
- Sakata
- Industry
- Agriculture
- Services
- Cloud Services
- Country
- Japan
Our collaboration began with the management of their licence agreements. This focused on their optimisation according to internal requests, activation of software insurance benefits, and support in contract compliance across the entire IT landscape.
Customer success manager
Synchronise and secure data
The entire Sakata Vegetables Europe team (which operates globally) had been working in Office 365 for several years. As a logical extension, the IT department wanted to accelerate its transformation to the Cloud."At SoftwareOne, we have been advising this agrifood giant on its IT needs for several years. Therefore, it was natural that Sakata asked us to create an agile information system that meets storage and security needs, and promotes collaborative work.
For the deployment of this large-scale project, we made two SoftwareOne cloud architects available to Sakata Vegetables", explains Benoit Demuth.
Cloud computing is, as mentioned, increasingly crucial to global businesses. As such, Cloud architects have become vital – if not indispensable – IT experts of the age.
They are responsible for deploying, storing, and managing each organisation's data on virtualised infrastructures.
The major challenge, in this case, was to synchronise the company's Active Directory environment with the Cloud.
Customer Success Manager
This was made feasible, in particular, thanks to Azure AD-type modules in the Office 365 environment. This made it possible to centralise the authentication of the various services provided via a single sign-on using Azure AD.
The second issue, of course, was the security of data and workstations (computers, mobile phones, and tablets). "For this, the second cloud architecture, Jean-Yves Dareau, set up various essential bricks."
Securing data involves addressing all of the following issues:
- Managing users and their access rights in the new workspace.
- Securing all workstations with the implementation of the Intune solution.
- Implementing DLP (Data Loss Prevention) functionalities to identify, control, and protect stored information and limit data leaks, whether accidentally or intentionally.
- Meeting the requirements of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and protecting the personal data of each user of this platform.
These different stages required methodology and rigour - before, during, and after its execution.
Synchronising the Active Directory with the Azure AD platform required advanced expertise in cloud computing. It was all about the integrity of company data and the skills of those tasked with implementation.
More collaboration and lower costs – exactly what Sakata needs
Thanks to this new platform, collaborative work across the organisation has been significantly enhanced.
For this international company, having a joint base at the IT level has delivered the following benefits:
- It can offer the same services to all employees (single Office 365 E3 plan, equipped with an EMS security brick - Microsoft Mobile Security).
- It can increase industrialisation and rationalise costs in the management of IT equipment.
- It has been able to centralise the management and supervision of the security of all the services offered by the IT department.
The two cloud architects' expertise also made it possible to deploy cloud licences while guaranteeing cost efficiency.
In addition to the fact that we support our customers in the operational implementation of their licences, we advise them each time on the infrastructure architecture to be deployed.
Customer Success Manager
“In Sakata's case, they are not on a full cloud infrastructure, but rather on a hybrid model. We audited all of their needs to define a development plan with them while optimising expenses”.
The next step: cybersecurity
Regardless of the size of your business, securing intellectual property is essential. Sakata is particularly sensitive about this issue. Alongside SoftwareOne, its team will soon be carrying out a cybersecurity audit mission.
The objective will be to analyse user practises, workstations, passwords, and company processes and give Sakata a ‘score’ to indicate its ‘maturity in security’.
Based on the results, SoftwareOne will define an action plan to improve this score. This audit will be carried out with the Csat tool from the QSsolution editor.
The objective here? To secure, to a higher level, the assets which make Sakata strong: its skills and its knowledge.