The Customer
Inter Pipeline Limited (IPL), a Canadian energy infrastructure company based in Calgary, Alberta, specializing in the transportation, processing, and storage of energy products across Western Canada and Europe.
The Project
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) Modernization
Overview
IPL’s Operational Technology (OT) team faced significant challenges in processing and delivering SCADA data across departments, often requiring substantial time and resources to fulfill requests. This engagement's aim was to centralize data access, reduce the burden on the OT team, and enable self-service analytics for faster, data-driven decision-making. Improving led the strategic planning, architecture, and implementation of a secure, scalable solution using Microsoft Azure and Power BI.
The Business Challenge
The Improving team encountered numerous challenges with this engagement:
Disparate Azure Tenants: IPL's IT and OT departments operated under separate Azure tenants with no shared administration. IPL’s OT tenant lacked an existing Azure subscription, requiring a complete build-out from scratch to realize the project’s objectives.
Large-Scale Data Replication: The project involved replicating large volumes of historical SCADA data, comprising thousands of tags with millions of associated daily readings. The challenge was to design a scalable solution capable of efficiently processing and storing the continuously growing data set, while being flexible enough to support future integrations from other source systems.
Strict Security Requirements: SCADA data is highly sensitive, requiring IPL to adhere to stringent security protocols. The solution needed to implement a zero-trust architecture, multi-factor authentication (MFA), conditional access, and robust role-based access control (RBAC) to secure the final OT tenant.
Our Solution
Improving adopted the following strategies to address the identified challenges.
Data/AI Strategic Planning: Improving designed a custom Azure architecture based on IPL's requirements and the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, including a data lake following the Medallion architecture model. This approach organized data into bronze, silver, and gold layers to ensure data integrity and quality across ingestion, transformation, and business-readiness stages. Azure Synapse Analytics pipelines and notebooks were implemented to automate data transformations, making incoming SCADA data quickly accessible for business analysis.
Scalable Data Processing: Improving developed a scalable, cloud-based system to manage the large volumes of SCADA data replication. Several layers of SQL Server replication were used to ingest data from on-premises systems into an Azure SQL Server located in the OT tenant. Azure Synapse Analytics was used in conjunction with the Azure SQL Server to incrementally ingest data into partitioned Delta Lake tables to align with industry standards and to maximize performance.
End-to-End Secure Architecture: A secure, zero-trust architecture was built into IPL’s new OT tenant. Key security measures included VNET-to-VNET routing through firewalls, ExpressRoute for secure on-premises data access, and segregated environments for development, testing, and production. Advanced security tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Azure Monitor ensured continuous protection of the system.
The Business Results
Key results from this project included:
Increased Efficiency: The new architecture significantly reduced the time required for IPL’s OT team to fulfill data requests, improving decision-making speed across departments and operational efficiency.
Centralized Data Access: The creation of a centralized data lake organized using the Medallion architecture enabled seamless extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of SCADA data. With a low latency from on-premises SCADA systems to the gold layer, this made data analytics and reporting through Power BI readily available to stakeholders.
Scalability: IPL now benefits from a scalable solution capable of growing with the increasing volume and sources of SCADA data, ensuring long-term viability.
Enhanced Security: The system included robust security measures such as zero-trust policies, MFA, and RBAC, safeguarding IPL’s sensitive operational data.
Why Improving
Improving was the ideal partner for IPL’s transition to an automated SCADA data management system, bringing deep expertise and industry best practices to the table. By moving away from a timeconsuming, manual process, we helped the company enhance real-time analytics, boosting operational efficiency and enabling insight-driven decision-making across the organization.
