The client is a premier research-intensive global biopharmaceutical company that delivers innovative health solutions and advances the prevention and treatment of diseases in people and animals.
The Challenge
The client was actively seeking to migrate their custom and COTS applications from on prem to AWS. The strategic priorities of the client included:
- Accelerating time to market and enabling the business to deliver life-changing products
- Driving innovation and productivity through digital and data
- Shifting to modern ways of working
- Migration and modernization on cloud
The Objective
The primary objective was to shift IT to modern ways of working by innovating the technology stack and accelerating the transformation to a cloud native organization. Additional goals of the project included:
- Enhance productivity and data quality across the pharma value chain
- Ensure timely and accurate reporting
- Support integrated data repositories for cross-functional data analysis
The Solution
The approach was to execute in tranches with defined tranche goals.
- Tranche 0: Explore and business case development
- Tranche 1: Modernize, retire, rehost applications and build foundational capabilities
- Tranche 2 and 3: Continue modernization, maturity and scale up
- Tranche 4: Drive adoption of modern practices
1. Requirements gathering:
Initial consultation
- Conducted meetings with key stakeholders from R&D, clinical trials and IT departments to understand their application readiness to migrate to AWS
- Identified pain points in data management, compliance and operational efficiency
Detailed assessment
- Assessed the application compatibility of systems like LIMS, ELN and laboratory information management to be on AWS
- Assessed the licensing and cost dependency with the product vendors
2. Workshops and strategic planning:
Collaborative workshops and strategic planning
- Organized workshops with cross-functional teams to discuss the findings and any specific requirements on the AWS services, deep dive on that current existing state and in the target state
- Developed a migration plan to accommodate the business needs and their product road map
Solution design
- Created a detailed migration runbook, to minimize downtime
- Conducted training sessions for IT staff to ensure familiarity with new AWS infra
- Design/architecture from scratch depending on the application owner and migration treatment category it falls under - Re-host, re-platform OS and DB upgrade, or migration to VMC
- Data demos at the enterprise level to assess compliance
- Automation at deployment
3. Migration success story:
Modernization planned in tranches with well-defined goals for each
- Central PMO team to run various tracks
- Specialized support teams like compliance, infra, DevOps, etc. are available for dedicated support for this program
- The pre-planning, collaboration and the data migrations using scripts helped reduce the application downtime
Security and Compliance
- Use of several security service requirements at deployment to assess compliance to infrastructure
- All the security and compliance requirements are predefined by the client ITRMS and security teams
- As per the needs of GxP applications, all the mandatory compliance requirements are defined, audited and tracked
- Implemented AWS IAM for robust identity and access management
- Used AWS KMS for data encryption and AWS CloudTrail for comprehensive logging and monitoring of API activity
- Automated vulnerability scans as part of CI/CD pipelines
Efficient data gathering
- Ensured smooth data collection from diverse sources like databases, applications and files using Amazon S3 for storage and AWS Lambda for processing
- Monitoring dashboard at the enterprise level that is streamed through AWSCloudWatch for data on consumption metrics across applications
- Various DevSecOps tools were used for automated deployment, reporting and monitoring
Cost-effective
- Utilized AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets to manage and optimize cloud spend
- Right-sized EC2, EBS and RDS
- Audited and cleaned up unused resources
- Implemented automation of EC2 instances during non-business hours and startup of instances during business hours
- Drive efficiencies using automation, value adds, templates for centralized usage
- Assessment of the current state to either go for a serverless option (preferred) or AWS managed services
DR and high availability
- Implementation is planned as per the product requirements and criticality
- Depending on DR, zone availability requirements are planned
- DR is planned during the target state architecture stage and dry run is performed to ensure seamless transition to cloud
- Option is provided to deploy or recreate infrastructure in the backup region using IAC pipelines
AWS services used:
- Amazon EC2
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon S3
- AWS Config
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS IAM
- AWS KMS
- AWS Systems Manager
- AWS Glue
- Amazon SageMaker
- AWS CloudWatch
The Impact
We enabled the business to achieve faster time-to-market, higher value generation and greater cost savings than expected.
- Value generation and saving millions of dollars - $5M savings due to app and infra modernization on AWS
- Enable business for faster turnaround to market
- DevSecOps efficiency increased ~ 20% for faster deployments and standardization
- Increased operational resilience through digital SDLC for efficiencies
- Improved performance and expedited data publishing time by ~ 25%
- Higher volume of data (preclinical, clinical and commercial) ingestion due to distributed workload in the backend
- Increased accuracy and quality by ~ 20%
- The seamless integration with various marketing website and R&D systems built on legacy tech stack, facilitated smooth data exchange and reduced manual data entry error
- Automated testing in QE platform for quality
- Access to better insights from data
- Harnessing the potential of real-time data analytics and generation of actionable insights led to a faster, data-driven approach to business decision making
