How do drug and vaccine research and development, Big Data and the cloud go together? Easily. The proof lies with the global biopharmaceutical company MSD, which has covered almost the entire world with its activities and located its branches in the largest cities. The Czech one was founded in 1992. And not only there in recent years they have faced the problem of data analysis, system stability and inconsistent access to the system. That is why MSD approached TrustSoft with the need of the expansion of the DevOps team and AWS knowledge.
Assignment
MSD employs almost 8,000 IT specialists worldwide.We became part of the Czech team that held a total of several dozen people, which were divided into separate groups. Our task was clear – to ensure the unification of access to all repositories, environments and Big data databases, including security policy, to automate processes and prepare templates for emerging environments, support and the optimization of settings.
Solution
We approached the whole assignment comprehensively and first got information on the way the teams develop drugs, how they analyze research results and drug efficacy, what problems they usually encounter during research and development, and then we could proceed to examine the stability and scalability of the environment.The infrastructure of the whole system runs in AWS. There are also various environments to which there was no uniform approach, and so, for example, the drug development team did not have access to the environment where analysis of data obtained from efficacy testing were taking place.
To unify access between repositories and Big data databases, we implemented Trino from Starburst into AWS. The entire infrastructure is managed in code via Terraform, which, for example, enables automation and acceleration of onboarding of new teams. The CI / CD then takes care of the automatic deployment of their own environment. We added Superset, a component for graphical display of complex and large data, and launched Ranger, a router that determines who has which permissions to access and to which environments.
Result
We still cooperate with MSD and, in addition to further development, we also provide support. The system is now stable, handling complex operations and analysis through scaling. After unifying the approach, global teams are far more efficient and the research and development of drug and vaccine is 5 to 10 times faster, which is a huge competitive advantage.
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| difficult collaboration across teams |  access automation |
| inconsistency of the environment | easy collaboration on a global scale |
| difficult onboarding of new teams | easy onboarding of new teams |
| more complicated analysis of large data | seamless analysis of large data |
| slower research system instability | system stability 5 to 10x acceleration in drug and vaccine development |
