Scaling Planetary
Health Research
From On-Prem Bottlenecks to Cloud-Scale Collaboration with Microsoft Azure
enabled
About Wits Planetary Health Research
Wits Planetary Health Research (PHR), part of the University of the Witwatersrand, conducts leading research at the intersection of public health and climate science. Its researchers analyse large clinical and environmental datasets that support scientific publications, public policy, funding initiatives, and health outcomes across Africa.
Platform: Modernising research infrastructure to support secure collaboration, governed data access, and cloud-scale analytics.
What Was Holding Research Back
01Limited infrastructure scalability created periodic capacity constraints and manual workarounds as research datasets continued to grow.
02Manual data preparation and provisioning increased analysis effort and slowed research cycles.
03Siloed environments limited collaboration across more than 20 researchers and created inconsistent access to shared datasets.
04Manual governance and access management increased compliance overhead for sensitive research information.
05Existing infrastructure constrained advanced analytics, machine learning and AI workloads.
How Decision Inc. Delivered
Azure Research Platform
Designed and implemented a scalable Microsoft Azure research platform that modernised existing workflows while preserving familiar research tools and introducing governance by design.
Familiar Research Experience
Implemented cloud-hosted JupyterHub with Python and R, enabling researchers to continue using existing analytical workflows while benefiting from elastic compute and storage.
Centralised Data Platform
Established Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage as a governed, shared repository for research data, replacing fragmented storage with a consistent source of truth.
Secure Cloud Foundation
Implemented an Azure Landing Zone with role-based access control, monitoring and governance policies to support secure research collaboration.
Elastic Research Infrastructure
Enabled on-demand compute and storage scaling to support growing datasets and computationally intensive analytical workloads.
What Wits PHR Now Has
Eliminated infrastructure constraints through scalable cloud compute and storage.
Improved collaboration across 20+ researchers through governed shared workspaces.
Reduced manual data preparation and provisioning activities.
Strengthened governance with role-based security and centralised access management.
Established a scalable platform ready for advanced analytics, machine learning and AI.
“The migration to Azure-Based Data Platform was an important step for us in modernising our data platform. The transition was handled smoothly and has given our team a stronger, more scalable foundation to build on as our research data needs grow. We’re glad to have had Decision Inc’s support through the process.”
The Technology
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Talk to our team about secure, governed cloud platforms for research and analytics on Microsoft Azure.
