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Case Study

Wayland Group

Large Cannabis Grower Manages Government Regulation and Global Expansion with Pivot3-LenovoIntelligent Infrastructure

About the Customer

Based in a well-established agricultural region in Southwest Ontario, Canada, and with a 500,000 square foot cultivation facility in Dresden, Germany, Wayland Group is a global leader in providing quality cannabis-derived medical and non-medical products. The company has recently embarked on a global expansion plan to meet the demand for legal cannabis, a market that is expected to reach $146.4 billion by the end of 2025 according to Grandview Research.

The Challenge

The ability to comply with governmentalregulations and protect a valuable cannabis crop at all stages of its journey from seed to end product, including securing grow operations, monitoring the packaging and shipping of the product, and monitoring personnel access to the facilities, makes a security system a mission-critical asset for cannabis growers. Wayland Group’s Senior Director of Security, Stephen Lem, inherited a varied network of security systems and IoT devices that were not designed to work together. To comply with Health Canada regulations and protect the business as it scales and brings online a new modern processing plant, Lem needed to update his video surveillance system.

Until 2019, Health Canada required cannabis growers to maintain two years of video footage. Today, governmental regulations require one rolling year of video which can be requested at any time, necessitating a search through terabytes or petabytes of video data. Lem’s original security system, including a QNAP network-attached storage, lacked the performance or reliability necessary to support agency requests.

“As our business grew, we began to experience scale-out problems, and with our aggressive business and expansion model, that wasn’t acceptable,” said Lem.

The Solution

As a long-time Milestone video management system customer, Wayland Group began to look at avenues to increase the capabilities of its system within the Milestone partner ecosystem.

“We were introduced to Pivot3 at an industry event,” Lem said. “And after hearing the value proposition, it made sense to me from both a scale and business perspective. Overall, what made my decision easy was that not only did Pivot3 promise to deliver a quality product, but it was also committed to ensuring the success of our business.” Lem purchased a combined Pivot3-LenovoSafe Campus solution to support 300 Axis cameras deployed with 5PBs of storage capacity. The Milestone VMS runs on the surveillance infrastructure. Together, Pivot3, Lenovoand Milestone offer best-in-class capabilities to deliver high-quality video images and vital analytics on a unified platform without ever dropping a frame.

The Pivot3-Lenovo solutionfor the cannabis industry is purpose-built to provide the ideal combination of security, performance, resilience and ease of use. The combined infrastructureeliminates downtime, data loss and video frame loss, provides seamless, non-disruptive scalability, and consolidates video management software (VMS) and other security and IoT applications on a single platform. The result is sustained, always-available access to video and IoT data, the highest video integrity, the flexibility to expand systems and operations as needed, and lower costs and complexity.

The Benefits

“With the Pivot3-Lenovo infrastructure, we have the right solution in placeto ensure quality and compliance with government regulations,” said Lem. “We canrespond to videorequests from Health Canada very quickly; what once took hours now takes under a minute.” In addition, Lem said that the company has experienced excellent resilience and reliability, ensuring access to their mission-critical video data.

Wayland Group has recently embarked on a global expansion plan to meet the demand for legal cannabis. “Much of what sold me on Pivot3 was the architecture, including the centralized management and ability to easily scale the infrastructure to keep up with our growth,” said Lem. The centralized solution allows Wayland Group to easily scale as more cameras are added to their surveillance network, and the company can scale compute,capacity and bandwidth simultaneously by adding a single appliance or independently add capacity with storage-only appliances to improve efficiency at scale.

Wayland plans to add other applications, such as its enterprise resource planning software, to the Pivot3-Lenovoinfrastructure. By having the option to add multiple mixed workloads, Wayland increases its ROI and lowers its footprint to realize immediate hardware savings.

As the legal cannabis market continues to expand at a rapid rate, Wayland is preparing its business infrastructure to meet the expected high demand. The company is building a state-of-the-art security operations center in Canada, which it plans to then duplicateat other locations across the globe. The number of security cameras will expand rapidly from today’s 300 as the SOC operation moves forward.

In addition, the company is focused on building a state-of-the-art cannabis processing facility. “Our new processing facility is purpose-built for our business,” said Lem. “It’s designed to meet our specific needs, thoroughly climate controlled, and driven by artificial intelligence and a control platform; it will be as secure as Fort Knox. We believe that we have the right systems and software in place to ensure quality and compliance is maintained and able to be replicated across the globe. This is the grow facility of the future, and by leveraging advanced technology, like the Pivot3-Lenovo solution,our investments will be paid back in spades in terms of reliability, uptime and return on investment.”