Qinecsa Solutions

Qinecsa Solutions is a company providing software and services for clinical research. It offers solutions for medical imaging and cardiac safety, clinical adjudication, randomization and trial supply management, electronic data capture, site payments, drug safety, pharmacovigilance, trial management, etc.

Challenge:

Qinecsa Solutions is running its web applications and internal applications hosted on-premises. They experienced frequent outages and failures in past few months which led to significant loss in the business productivity.

Qinecsa Solutions wanted to move their business-critical workloads to cloud because it offered better reliability, faster performance, more security capabilities, and lower pricing. They also wanted to achieve the business continuity with minimal RPO and RTO.

Solution:

Qinecsa Solutions approached our partner Velocis, seeking expert advice to help in their cloud migration journey. Hence, Redington and Velocis collaborated to help accelerate their cloud migration. By leveraging AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) methodology, we will conduct discovery and analysis to get a clear picture of what will be migrating, as well as a business case and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis for migration. This analysis will result with data required for Customer to make the cloud decision and how best to proceed with future steps.

1. Assess Phase

In the Assess phase, Redington carried out a thorough assessment of Qinecsa Solutions on-premises data center, studied the environment clearly and a detailed inventory list was prepared by having the following parameters in the infrastructure:

• Number of servers to be migrated

• Different types of operating system and evaluation of security at the operating system level

• Processor and memory required for the application, user concurrency and various utilization levels.

• Storage growth rate, utilization, and configuration

• Methodologies and frequency of backup and restore requirements.

In an application review process, Redington identified the applications could be transitioned based on the following,

• Integration and dependencies points

• Performances of the applications

• The growth rate of the user with a clear road map towards the cloud.

Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) will be conducted which enables with the following:

• An understanding of the cloud journey for business

• A sense of SWOT concerning migration to a cloud-ready enterprise

• An action plan to close identified gaps.

2. Mobilize Phase

In the Mobilize phase, Redington along with Velocis worked jointly to address gaps in their organization’s readiness that were uncovered during assessment, with a focus on building baseline environment, operational readiness, and developing cloud skills.

In mobilize phase, PoC was conducted for minimal workload which helped them in understanding their migration process to AWS cloud. Migration during the mobilize phase is an iterative process that evolves as the organization develops new skills, tools, and capabilities. These skills and capabilities build momentum and accelerate the migration efforts over time.

Post migration of pilot workload, Well-Architected Review was conducted. This systematic approach which evaluated AWS architecture helped to identify and fix potential issues with your environment.

Establishing the right foundation to build on is a key to a successful migration. This phase helps to identify key business drivers for migration and the best strategies for planning and implementing a successful cloud migration.

3. Migration and Modernize Phase

After the Assess and Mobilize phase, the final phase to AWS Cloud migration journey is “Migrate and Modernize phase”. Redington and Velocis engaged with Qinecsa Solutions to complete the modernization and migration process and gain the immense benefits of the cloud. Different migration strategy was defined for different workload that needs to be migrated as listed below,

Customer was managing their On-premises web application’s source code in Github repository. We suggested to migrate their web application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk using the binary method. Elastic Beanstalk builds the binary for the source bundle and deploys it to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. Elastic Beanstalk handles the rest -- from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, to application health monitoring.

As a rehost migration strategy, this approach is fast and requires no code modification, which reduced testing and migration time.

Qinecsa Solutions had in-house applications hosted in physical servers with several dependencies, and it was difficult to migrate the legacy application using automated tools. In this scenario, we have automated their infrastructure provisioning using terraform template; data was migrated manually by uploading data to Amazon S3, which was later imported to the EC2 instances.

Database was migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a managed service that makes it simple to operate and scale databases in the AWS Cloud. Deploying RDS can take several minutes which has been reduced by automating the deployment process using terraform templates. Data migration has been carried out using native MySQL tools. The export dump files were copied to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and imported into the Amazon RDS for MySQL database in AWS before the cutover.

Qinecsa Solutions used self-managed open-source Elasticsearch but the company found that a self-managed approach posed several challenges. In order to achieve availability and minimize management tasks, Qinecsa Solutions migrated to Amazon OpenSearch Service. Index snapshots are a popular way to migrate from a self-managed Elasticsearch cluster to Amazon OpenSearch Service. This migration approach has been adopted to migrate to Amazon OpenSearch which helps to easily ingest, secure, search, aggregate, view, and analyze data for log analytics and visualization.

AWS well-architected framework was followed throughout the implementation. Additionally, Qinecsa Solutions had benefited from utilizing AWS Services like Amazon Cloud watch and Cloud trail to effectively monitor and safeguard all AWS resources. With AWS Key Management Service (KMS), key storage, key management and data has been protected, both in transit, and at rest. AWS Transit Gateway is implemented to connect different Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) through a central hub which simplifies the network and puts an end to complex peering relationships. In addition to this, Private Link and OpenVPN Access Server has been implemented to establish private connectivity between AWS services and users across globe. With this network solution, Qinecsa Solutions was able to protect business critical data, implement access control and network segmentation, and provided encrypted remote access to users.

Outcome:

By moving their workload to AWS Cloud, Qinecsa Solutions was able to achieve their defined technical drivers in the most cost-effective manner while maintaining business continuity and high availability of their pharmaceutical workload.

Qinecsa Solutions achieves quantifiable value by migrating to AWS Cloud, such as

• Avoided unexpected costs and delays in defining goals and requirements upfront which made the migration quicker and more cost-effective.

• 40% cost savings in infrastructure setup

• Decrease in unplanned downtime

• Maintain business continuity and high availability of workload

• Strong cloud foundation built by adopting Well-Architected principles ensuring workloads are aligned with best practice from day one.

Additionally, operation tasks like auto scaling, monitoring, log analysis, backing up of the data etc. have been automated which has reduced the repetitive tasks.