About the Client
Vitaccess provides biopharmaceutical companies with apps that enable them to connect with patients anywhere in real-time. When the company developed a proof of concept for a faster approach to development, we took steps to make it secure, reliable, and scalable.
Challenge: Proof of Concept Needed DevOps Support
Vitaccess had developed an innovative app delivery method that evolved and accelerated software development for its Vitaccess Real platform. The new method uses configuration rather than coding, which enables new apps to progress from concept to market in weeks instead of months. In the competitive biopharmaceutical space, this offers an effective way to continually adapt and improve the business offering in line with customers’ needs.
The new platform’s proof of concept was built on AWS Amplify, allowing the Vitaccess team to make a quick start. However, additional work was needed before it could make the transition to a live production environment with 24×7 DevOps-led cloud engineering support.
Vitaccess initially approached us with a view to signing up for managed cloud services. In the end, we also worked with the team to rebuild and re-platform the architecture, getting the new approach ready for reliable and secure implementation at scale.
“Our existing method was taking too long to deliver new applications, despite the optimisation of many processes. We devised a new approach but didn’t have the in-house resource to get it production-ready then maintain it over time. [The collaboration enabled us] to resolve this and bring the platform to life.”
Wil Hepworth
Head of Product Delivery, Vitaccess
Solution: Platform Restructure Reflects AWS Best Practice
The project kicked off with a series of technical workshops to reveal Vitaccess’ needs and identify current issues th could be resolved during the rebuild. From early on we understood that security was a critical factor given the potentially sensitive nature of patient data with which customers would be working.
We rebuilt the architecture using AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers. The open-source tool Terraform was used to enable easy environment creation using Infrastructure as Code, setting Vitaccess up to benefit from simple, fast and consistent infrastructure provisioning as well as lower costs.
Everything was configured in line with the Amazon Well-Architected Framework, with particular attention given to the security pillar. An important feature of the architecture redesign was the ability to securely attach AWS cloud-native services to the virtual private cloud (VPC). This means traffic from internal services does not traverse the public cloud, thereby enhancing overall platform security.
We held regular demos with the core team, backed up with supporting documentation, to ensure they have the confidence and capability to maintain the set-up.
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
