Microsoft Azure Case Study

- After 3.11 public housing construction started in the disastrous Tohoku Region. Onagawa Town Recovery Public Housing Construction Promotion Council was organized for small/medium local constructors to receive a collective order from Onagawa Town. Constructors usually receive advanced payment in regular public works. But in this particular project payment takes place only when the works are completed, which made these local constructors suffer from fund shortage caused by labor and material costs. It eventually caused a delay in the whole construction project.

- The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. and Mitsubishi Research Institute (hereinafter MRI) jointly announced a fund aid scheme in Dec. 2013 as a way to get out of the financial difficulties. The scheme enabled local constructors to receive progress-based payment by using electronically recorded credit, which pushed forward the whole construction process in the disastrous area.

- In order to realize this fund aid scheme progress management system had to be built so that MRI as a progress verifier could check the progress for each individual construction.
- MRI and JBS thought that a cloud computing service with a mobile device is a required combination to connect the progress verifier and local constructor remotely. After studying multiple options, we reached a conclusion of utilizing Microsoft Azure and Tablet Computers with Windows 8.1 in the following reasons.

The Tablet Computer should have a wide range of device/peripheral options in addition to the capabilities of camera and location information. High accurate GPS module, which did not support iOS tablets, was especially required.
Taking into consideration the ease of application development and implementation for exchanging data between the constructor and the verifier, robust security, and domestic disaster recovery, Microsoft Azure was considered as the best service because data centers are located in Eastern Japan and Western Japan, and software development environment is well-positioned. For the future expansion a video conference system like Microsoft Lync was very attractive.

Microsoft Azure Case Study - Mitsubishi Research Institute (Japanese)