Success Story
GESDA
GESDA, the Geneva-based organisation uniting science and diplomacy, needed a secure, scalable digital platform to support its global foresight work. With over 2.65 million data records, real-time inputs from Osaka, and the need to deliver bilingual content in English and Japanese, their systems were under serious pressure. Pivotal led the transformation — designing a fully internationalised infrastructure, building secure APIs, and streamlining workflows with automated deployment. The result? A future-ready platform that powers GESDA’s mission with speed, clarity, and control.
Don’t just keep up. Anticipate.
3.1 TiB secured
2.65M Records
Multiple Languages
“Pivotal brought clarity, creativity, and technical excellence to a highly ambitious project. As part of GESDA’s Public Portal to Anticipation, we needed a platform that could handle complexity without losing accessibility — multilingual content, live data, dynamic visuals — all delivered with speed and integrity. Pivotal made it happen. They understood the stakes, and delivered a solution that worked beautifully, both behind the scenes and in the hands of the public.”
— Niniane Paeffgen, Advisor, Public Portal to Anticipation at GESDA
The Opportunity
GESDA’s digital infrastructure had to match the scale and seriousness of its mission. Operating at the intersection of science and diplomacy, they weren’t dealing with simple websites or static content — they were working with live, sensitive data from installation sites like Osaka, powering tools used by global stakeholders and researchers. There were several critical needs: securely host and manage over 2.65 million data records (totalling more than 3.1 TiB), design a smooth way to gather data from the field, and enable rich, bilingual content experiences in English and Japanese. On top of that, they wanted to visualise foresight insights through shareable, interactive components, while keeping everything fast, compliant, and future-ready. They didn’t need a website. They needed a system.
The Solution
Pivotal developed a robust, scalable architecture on Microsoft Azure, purpose-built to handle GESDA’s unique demands. Using modern DevOps practices, we implemented automated CI/CD pipelines to ensure deployments were consistent, secure, and easy to manage over time. A custom API layer was created to handle data intake from the installation site in Osaka, ensuring integrity and security at every step. For content, we built a fully internationalised CMS that supported animated storytelling and real-time updates in both English and Japanese — no plug-ins or clunky workarounds. To help users explore GESDA’s foresight research, we designed and developed a bilingual Vision Board app, allowing contributors to submit and browse 'visions' from around the world. These could be instantly turned into visually rich, shareable images on the fly — optimised for different formats and screen types. Every component was engineered to serve both performance and purpose.
The Results
GESDA’s internal workflows are now faster, more efficient, and no longer reliant on manual workarounds or insecure data handling. The ability to process and present vast volumes of information in a clean, user-friendly interface has fundamentally changed how GESDA’s teams share and build on their work. Real-time publishing, automated image generation, bilingual support, and dynamic visualisation tools have given the organisation a new level of agility. With everything underpinned by a stable Azure infrastructure, GESDA can confidently operate across time zones and regions without fear of downtime or data loss. More than just a platform upgrade, this was a leap forward in how GESDA connects science and diplomacy through technology — and Pivotal made it possible.