As the world’s population grows, the demand for healthy food grows along with it. Salmon provider Mowi is committed to meeting that demand through sustainable fish farming. To make its ambitious goals a reality, Mowi set its sights on modernizing the core IT systems – and the “Cloud first strategy” is paying off.
Feeding the world. As far as challenges go, it’s hard to imagine a greater one. The ocean covers 70 percent of our planet, yet only 7 percent is used for food production. But, as the United Nations states, that number is going to have to rise dramatically. In fact, according to the UN’s OECD-DAO Agricultural Outlook 2022–2031, the world will need to produce an additional 30 million tons of aquatic food to maintain current consumption in 2030.
The drive for a sustainable food future
Mowi is the world’s largest provider of Atlantic salmon and is leading the Blue Revolution – an initiative to meet the growing, global food demand by developing responsible aquaculture. With over 11,000 employees working in 25 countries, Mowi already supplies one-fifth of all farm-raised Atlantic salmon, and its goal is to produce even more food from the ocean – all while prioritizing fish health and sustainability.
Delivering on this mission, however, requires leading-edge infrastructure and technology that can help maximize security and productivity while minimizing costs. As the company’s data center hardware began to approach end-of-life, Mowi saw an opportunity for a technology refresh. The idea was to have IT/tech as a catalyst for positive change, a partner in business development and an innovator for improving fish farming.
Taking aquaculture to the cloud
Previously, Mowi relied on its large data center in Slough, England, for most of the data storage and backup needs. The site housed more than 70 servers and maintaining such a large-scale data center was a significant drain on resources.
Mowi engaged its long-term technology consultant Cognizant to migrate the data. Cognizant handled the end-to-end migration, ensuring that all 70+ were transferred to the cloud platform Azure on time and within budget, including infrastructure servers and business-critical hosted applications. Despite unforeseen challenges with the existing network line, Cognizant completed the migration with zero downtime to Mowi’s ongoing operations.
Tech supporting a sustainable future
Among the advantages are impressive results in terms of cost, licensing, labor, flexibility, and security. More importantly, when the information silos were removed, global operations could be streamlined and coordinated to improve overall productivity and collaboration across business.
The data center refresh is also set to play a large role in Mowi’s ongoing work to safeguard fish health. The company is utilizing a rapidly growing number of IoT devices, such as underwater cameras and sensors, which are generating volumes of data around issues such as lice count, data that can help improve fish health.