In the field of life sciences research, efficient data management, performance optimization, and regulatory compliance are critical factors for success. As the world increasingly embraces cloud technology, a staggering 60 percent of the world’s corporate data is stored in the cloud. 

Harnessing the power of cloud technology is essential for organizations like TetraScience, a life sciences cloud data integration company. Founded in 2014 by scientists and engineers from Harvard and MIT, TetraScience enables large pharmaceuticals and growth-stage biotech companies to easily access and manage scientific data, improve operational efficiency, support regulatory compliance, and enable novel analytics. 

With TetraScience, researchers can remotely monitor, manage, and automate experiments from any location, ensuring data integrity and enabling collaboration. To achieve its goals, TetraScience partnered with nClouds, a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). 

In this blog, we will explore how nClouds helped TetraScience improve performance efficiency, flexibility, and security while reducing costs and enhancing the user experience.

The Challenge 

TetraScience’s mission to bring cloud software to the laboratory required it to modernize its IT infrastructure to improve performance efficiency, repeatability, consistency, and flexibility. It needed a solution that would enhance security and regulatory compliance while reducing costs. 

In partnering with nClouds, TetraScience found the ideal ally to help it overcome these challenges. With nClouds’ expertise in AWS technologies and its deep understanding of the life sciences domain, it could develop a comprehensive solution that addressed all the critical aspects. The collaboration would not only enable TetraScience to enhance its performance, security, and compliance but also provide it with cost-efficient operations and a seamless user experience.

The Solution 

nClouds collaborated with TetraScience early in its software development process to modernize its infrastructure using containerization and a DevOps approach. 

This approach allowed TetraScience to save time, improve repeatability and consistency, enable deployment flexibility, support regulatory compliance, and reduce costs. By abstracting its applications from the underlying environment, containerization enabled TetraScience to deploy its software easily and consistently across various computing resources.

The new infrastructure architecture leveraged AWS Fargate, a compute engine for Amazon ECS and EKS, which eliminated the need for server and cluster management. Additionally, nClouds implemented automation using Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS CloudFormation, simplifying container management, scaling, workload scheduling, and resource provisioning. The solution also incorporated versioning with AWS Service Catalog, facilitating the setup of new environments and ensuring control and improvement of specific requirements.

To address security and regulatory compliance concerns, nClouds implemented comprehensive encryption measures for data in flight and at rest. Monitoring, centralized logging, and testing were implemented to optimize database capacity, container performance, and health while minimizing operational complexity. 

Results 

The collaboration between TetraScience and nClouds yielded significant benefits across multiple areas:

1. Improved performance efficiency, repeatability, consistency, and flexibility: Containerization ensured quick and reliable deployments regardless of the deployment environment. Automation streamlined development, test workflows, container management, and configuration management.
2. Enhanced security and regulatory compliance: The new infrastructure incorporated encryption measures for data in flight and at rest, aligning with life sciences regulatory requirements. TetraScience achieved improved security at every layer of the architecture, ensuring compliance with regulations governing drug and device research.
3. Reduced costs: Through the utilization of nOps, TetraScience identified and terminated unused servers, optimizing resource utilization and cost efficiency. The ability to determine the necessity of active services based on different workflows further contributed to cost reduction.
4. Improved user experience and service-level agreements (SLAs): With nClouds providing 24/7/365 infrastructure support services with a 10-minute SLA, TetraScience’s engineers could focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance. Real-time awareness of the environment’s status and proactive incident remediation improved user experience and prevented many issues from occurring.

By partnering with nClouds, TetraScience successfully modernized its IT infrastructure, empowering its life sciences research with improved performance, security, and cost efficiency. The collaboration between the two companies exemplifies the power of cloud technology and expert consulting in driving innovation and success in scientific research. Read the full case study here.

About nClouds

nClouds is an award-winning Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner focused on helping organizations accelerate innovation. We partner with our customers to migrate, modernize, and manage cloud operations initiatives to support their digital transformation journeys. We provide high-performance consulting and support solutions for every stage of the cloud journey, enabling our customers to improve business agility and innovation velocity, reduce operational costs, and improve workforce efficiencies.

nClouds’ core practices include cloud migration, application modernization, cloud optimization, managed services, and DevOps. Learn more at nclouds.com.