In the increasingly digital context in which companies operate, data security and privacy protection have become essential priorities. Data represents the foundation on which business operations and customer trust are built; protecting it is essential to ensure the long-term sustainability and success of organizations. This is why Werfen turned to Omnys, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to consolidate its IT infrastructure and improve data security.
Client
Werfen is a global leader in the In Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) sector. Founded in Spain in 1966, it operates in 34 countries with research, development, and production centers in the United States and Europe.
Challenge
Operating in the healthcare sector, where data security is based on strict national regulations (which companies must comply with by passing rigorous certification processes), Werfen needed to transform its Italian IT infrastructure to improve the security of its data by consolidating its on-premises Oracle databases.
Werfen's Italian operations were managed from an on-premises data center in Spain, with various mission-critical Oracle database instances and web applications. The company needed to migrate its existing IT infrastructure to the cloud in order to benefit from the data protection, scalability, and elasticity that the AWS infrastructure could provide.
Services Used
Werfen turned to Omnys for the realization of this important project.
"OMNYS had worked with AWS and some of the largest pharmaceutical companies," says Elena Lattuada, service director at Werfen. "This gave us a lot of confidence, and they did not disappoint us."
Omnys developed a 3-phase plan to consolidate, transform, and then migrate Werfen's infrastructure to AWS. The first phase involved assessment, where Omnys used AWS Migration Hub, which provides tools to simplify migrations and modernizations to AWS.
"More than 99% of the data and storage were automatically transferred using AWS Migration Hub", says Davide Pozza, chief technology officer (CTO) of Omnys.
In the second phase, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and scalable compute capacity for most workloads, was used to create a demo environment useful for evaluating the feasibility and functionality of the migration process.
During the third phase, Omnys used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a migration service that helps migrate database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime, and AWS DataSync, a secure online service that automates and accelerates data migration between on-premises storage and AWS.
In the final phase, Amazon RDS for Oracle, a fully managed commercial database, was used to simplify the setup, operation, and scalability of Oracle deployments in the cloud.
"This was our biggest challenge, and we ensured it was thoroughly tested before going live" (D. Pozza).
Avoiding disruptions was also crucial to the success of this migration.
Results Achieved
The migration from legacy servers to Amazon EC2 resulted in a 25% increase in performance, but not only that. Werfen also noticed improvements in reliability, with a significant reduction in downtime compared to its on-premises infrastructure.
Werfen is now using AWS to manage oral anticoagulant therapy for approximately 500,000 patients, each of whom requires treatments about once a month.
