Solution Overview

Our customer provides pharmacovigilance services that meet the highest pharma regulatory standards such as compliance, quality, and end customer service which enables them to process and analyse medical cases in a timely and efficient manner.

The customer’s initial plan was to setup up IT infrastructure on-premises, but due to the huge capital investment required, they did not find it cost effective to build their own datacentre. Quadra approached the customer and suggested a cost-effective op-ex model approach for the same deployment. We dealt with the following challenges posed by the on-premises model that could be addressed by the cloud:

• Inability to quickly deploy infrastructure when needed - Quick turnaround time to deploy new data servers was very important for the future deployments
• Inability to scale with demand - As our customer’s demands grew, they would need to expand their existing applications seamlessly
• Managing costs - The on-premises datacentres were becoming too expensive and inefficient to support their growing business operations. The customer wanted to scale with demand while keeping the costs down.
• Security Concerns - There was a need for better security measures with less infrastructure complexity to handle data security breaches.

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Quadra at Work

Quadra’s AWS Solutions Architects conducted a thorough study of the system and workflow of the applications which were to be deployed on-premises, as the migration of applications to AWS needed accurate planning. The customer’s business challenges had to be addressed as well. Therefore, we followed the following course:

• Assess - At first, a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) was done to review the Customer’s readiness for cloud migration. We needed to present a justified business case. This assessment gave a clear picture of what to migrate and the total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Discover - The Pharmacovigilance application along with its dependencies were listed for migration. A comprehensive solution was designed which was to be implemented in two phases.
• Mobilize - We would migrate the applications to gain maximum benefit with seamless integration, minimize time-intensive processes, thus doing a flawless execution.
• Migrate - Finally, we migrated the applications within two days so they could test and move on to production as quickly as possible.

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Technical Architecture

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Business Benefits Realized

The transition to the AWS Cloud enhanced the customer’s network configurations using AWS Virtual Private Cloud and EC2 instances launched with integrated Red Hat Enterprise Linux inside a private subnet for restricting public access to the server. Elastic Block Storage (EBS) was used with the latest SSD-backed volumes. For the application to be publicly available we configured an Application Load Balancer which will act as the single point of contact for the clients and distributes the incoming traffic. For connectivity to their application team, we created a site-to-site VPN to deliver high availability by using two tunnels across multiple availability zones with the AWS global network. We stream traffic through the first tunnel and use the second tunnel for redundancy – even if one tunnel goes down, the traffic continues to flow.

We have used Relational Database service from Oracle a commercial database that makes it easy to setup, operate and scale deployments in the cloud with a single-AZ Deployment.

We have employed AWS monitoring and backup services including CloudWatch, CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and AWS Backup, improving the company's data security and reliability.

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Quantifiable Outcomes

Migrating to AWS has resulted in the following benefits to our  customer:

• The application went live within 3 days from the date of order confirmation.
• We leveraged No upfront Savings plan pricing model which optimizes the cloud spend and gives the flexible option to pay monthly operations cost.
• Instead of purchasing costly perpetual Oracle license with support and services as a one-time upfront investment, we opted for RDS approach with monthly payments.
• We expedited the Time-to-market from 6 weeks to 1 week which has given the confidence to the customer to migrate more infrastructure to the cloud.
• Customer has now the complete visibility of the resources deployed, and they are able to take control of each service very quickly by following the operating model.
• We were able to submit the GxP compliance report quickly to the client.