Case Study | Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative
How Zazz Transformed Wildlife Surveillance for National Resilience
A secure cloud platform that unifies field reports, laboratory diagnostics, and cross-province analytics in real time.
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The Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC) turned to ZAZZ to replace aging, siloed tools with a single, nation-scale surveillance system. Built on cloud-native microservices and zero-trust security, the new application captures incident data from field biologists, routes samples to veterinary labs, and shares analytics with provincial and federal agencies—strengthening Canada’s ability to detect, track, and mitigate wildlife health threats.
The Engineering Impact
Accelerating speed, accuracy, and uptime with smart automation.
The Challenge
Critical Need
- Real-time incident reporting from remote regions
- Integrated lab workflows across five regional veterinary centres
- Nationwide data sharing with PHAC, CFIA, and provincial ministries
- Security & compliance for sensitive geolocation and pathogen data
Risk to Mandate
- Delayed outbreak response, larger ecological impact
- Manual data entry, sample mislabeling, slow turn-around
- Incomplete surveillance picture; compliance exposure
- Breach liability, loss of public trust
Legacy Limitation
- Paper forms & email chains; no offline-sync capability
- Disconnected LIMS, no barcode or chain-of-custody tracking
- CSV exports, no secure API layer, inconsistent taxonomy
- Outdated auth, no MFA, servers hosted off-shore
The Objective
Build a secure, cloud-native surveillance platform that:
- Captures field incidents in real time even offline—in every province and territory.
- Automates lab workflows with end-to-end barcode, chain-of-custody, and HL7-FHIR data exchange.
- Enables national analytics & alerting for PHAC, CFIA, and provincial ministries within minutes of sample receipt.
- Enforces zero-trust security and PIPEDA compliance for sensitive geolocation and pathogen data.
- Scales elastically to peak wildlife-migration periods while sustaining sub-15-minute RTO/RPO for continuity.
The Solution
- Field & Mobile Incident Module: Progressive Web App with offline cache, GPS tagging, photo capture, and one-tap sample barcoding. Data syncs via GraphQL over TLS 1.3; conflict-free replication resolves overlaps automatically.
- Laboratory Integration Layer: HL7-FHIR adapters link regional LIMS to a central event bus. Chain-of-custody tracking with QR codes and immutable audit history stored in DynamoDB Streams.
- National Analytics & Reporting Hub: Stream-processed data lands in Redshift; Looker dashboards expose trends by species, pathogen, and geography. Role-based APIs push alerts to PHAC/CFIA and provincial wildlife officers in < 5 minutes from sample receipt.
We now detect emerging threats in hours, not days.”
- Cloud & DevSecOps Framework: Kubernetes on AWS ca-central-1 with autoscaling nodes sized by migration and calving seasons. Infrastructure as Code via Terraform; blue-green deploys and automated CIS benchmark scanning on every commit. Identity federation through Entra ID with SAML 2.0 + MFA; granular RBAC down to collection crew level.
- Compliance & Resilience: Fully PIPEDA-aligned storage; AES-256 at rest, rotating KMS keys. WCAG 2.1 AA UI for public dashboards; French/English content parity. Active-active multi-AZ, RPO < 5 min, RTO < 15 min.
The Impact
- 4× faster confirmation of high-risk pathogens (average 72 h → 18 h).
- 90 % reduction in manual data entry across regional labs.
- 99.96 % system uptime through peak migration events and wildfire seasons.
- Nationwide visibility: 10 federal and 13 provincial/territorial bodies consume live APIs daily.
- Regulatory confidence: Zero non-conformities in the latest PHAC cyber-resilience audit.
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