Source BioScience, provides industry-leading laboratory services in Genomics and Histopathology, partnering with biotechnology, pharmaceutical, healthcare and academia. Given such industry expertise, it’s no surprise that Source BioScience partner with AWS for technology services including access to leading turn-key solutions specifically designed for healthcare, life sciences and pharma manufacturing. However, with the continual pace of change in Cloud, Source BioScience identified an AWS partner would provide the optimum blend of resource and scale to ensure its AWS workloads are future proof (code first reliability) with 24x7x365 support. Given its existing relationship, coupled with their mature partner status, it was an obvious choice to partner with Softcat.
The Challenge
While AWS was already the preferred platform, as with many organisations, the ability to keep pace with the changes in Cloud coupled with the continual rise in Cloud costs, resulted in Source BioScience exploring managed service partner solutions.
With an already longstanding relationship in place, the Softcat team were able to move quickly to provide advice and expertise to help Source BioScience explore options and make recommendations based on what other businesses were doing when facing similar challenges.
The required solution, a managed service, was immediately apparent with Softcat’s highly automated onboarding process and previous experience, the deciding factors to move forward at pace.
“The resourcing of our IT team was under pressure, at a time where we wanted we wanted to focus less on the BAU, while ensuring cost efficiency with focus to new solutions. A quick conversation with our long-standing partner, Softcat, highlighted what other businesses were doing when faced with similar challenges, and the required solution was then obvious” Richard Chaplin, IT Director, Source BioScience
Critical Success Factors
- Scalable AWS expertise
- Guidance on how to efficiently evolve the use of AWS
- Incrementally evolve the platform
The Solution
With the objective clear, the engagement with Source Bioscience was similar to many other Softcat projects and thus highly repeatable – the key to not introducing lots of additional cost or delays.
The Softcat team, including project manager, lead site reliability engineer and Architect, started by assessing the current state of AWS platform and identifying the areas where we could improve it (security, architecture, reliability, cost).
Several changes were identified with a plan agreed with Source BioScience to implement a range of this during onboarding as well as post once in BAU service. Key changes included; application of AWS organisations and accounts, general IAM remediations, security & cost remediations to several S3 buckets, separation of environment resources (e.g. compute and databases) and general removal of old resources.
Alongside such updates, Softcat’s evolved the overall platform with its DevOps approach to ensure automation, reliability, and quality within Source Bioscience’s infrastructure. Terraform was utilized for Infrastructure as Code, with GitHub to automate deployment workflow through a series of CI/CD pipelines leveraging a range of AWS native services including AWS Systems Manager, AWS Backup, AWS Lambda, and CloudWatch. This provides the optimum blend of scalable service support coupled with cloud native services.
Highlights
- 24x7x365 Support from Softcat’s AWS engineering (SRE) team
- Remediation of critical issues and future proofing of the overall platform
- Blended of Softcat shared service automation (CI/CD) in conjunction with AWS native services
The Benefits
The primary benefit is Softcat’s proactive PlatformOps to ensure that Source Bioscience's AWS platform remains efficient and effective. Associated benefits were realized not only during the onboarding phase but also continuously throughout the service lifecycle, demonstrating the long-term value of Softcat’s Managed Service.
The key results are:
- A highly automated and standardised AWS platform, with a Softcat 24x7x365 managed service for PlatformOps, to ensure continuous governance (architecture, commercial, security and reliability).
- The Softcat Cloud Management Platform identified cost-saving opportunities and optimized cloud spend, contributing to financial efficiency
- Adoption of Softcat standards for technology and process improvements enhanced the performance, resilience, and security of the AWS platform.
“Our work with Softcat, has uncovered a new layer to our already long-standing partnership. We worked in close collaboration, learning lessons as we went. We now have total confidence that Softcat, as the AWS experts, will maintain our platform and evolve it where required.” Richard Chaplin, IT Director, Source BioScience