Logicalis

Logicalis managed service proves to be the perfect medicine

The Client

Avecia is a leading private biotechnology company specialising in the development and manufacture of innovative biotechnology-based medicines. With a long history of technological innovation, the company works closely with other biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to help them achieve fast progress into - and through - the clinical development programme. Avecia Biologics, one of the company’s two business units, is a world leading contract developer and manufacturer of biologics for human healthcare products. From its base in Billingham in the Tees Valley, it has grown rapidly over the last five years, investing over US$150m in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities.

The Challenge

Nowhere is the availability and accuracy of information more critical than in the pharmaceutical industry, where compliance with stringent auditing and reporting procedures are a high priority. Like any company involved in manufacturing medicines, Avecia Biologics is heavily regulated and regularly inspected by government bodies. Round-the-clock systems management and monitoring are therefore essential to support the company’s IT processes, which are the lifeblood of its operations.

“Following restructuring of the Avecia Group in 2005-06, we urgently needed to upgrade and consolidate our legacy IT to meet the modern demands of our industry and to comply with regulations for electronic data protection, including data backup and recovery laid down by governing bodies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA),” says Campbell Kay, Avecia’s Head of IT. “As well as making our applications and processes more efficient, we were keen to demonstrate to customers and regulators alike that we’re continually developing our compliance programme.”

Kay says the increasing automation of systems, coupled with a greater emphasis on trending data, has also placed much more focus on IT and its ability to secure and protect data from loss, corruption and unauthorised access. A legacy of organic growth and divestment, however, meant significant areas of Avecia’s infrastructure were undocumented and vulnerable through unsupported software and ageing hardware.

“Our challenge was therefore to relocate, rationalise and modernise our infrastructure to meet current industry standards, while at the same time continuing to support a business which demands minimum downtime,” he says.

The Solution

With only modest internal IT resources and expertise to achieve this, Kay quickly recognised the need for outside help and called upon ICT solutions provider and managed services specialist Logicalis to help design and ‘virtualise’ a significant chunk of Avecia's IT infrastructure.

Working to demanding timelines following the termination of a previous service support contract, the Logicalis team designed and delivered a virtualisation project, reducing 100 servers down to 40 and implementing high-performance software for many of the company’s applications and processes. Kay anticipates further reductions in server numbers as applications confirm their support for virtual machines.

“Logicalis recommended we first virtualise the servers on our existing platforms, then use the virtualisation technology where necessary to upgrade these, once the service had been transferred. This would minimise the risk of making too many changes at once to our NT servers and older applications. I’m delighted to say that virtualisation has greatly increased the resilience of our IT infrastructure and reduced the need for segregated development environments.”

Following the success of this initial project, in October 2007, Avecia awarded Logicalis a five-year managed services contract to look after its consolidated IT infrastructure and to support compliance regulations by providing 24/7 management and monitoring of the company’s server farms, office applications, security infrastructure and storage area network (SAN).

The Outcome

Logicalis began by implementing Avecia’s new SAN to provide the company with centralised data storage and standardised data backups. Ageing firewalls and custom desktops, which had previously led to security risks, were then replaced by a reliable Cisco firewall and a completely new desktop.

“Logicalis also rationalised our Exchange servers, and migrated our employees to Exchange 2003 in an offline virtual environment, thereby avoiding any downtime for users,” says Kay. “Having lived with Exchange 5.5 for so long, the availability of Outlook Web Access means our employees - and particularly our remote workers - are delighted they can now access their email and calendars from anywhere with an Internet connection, greatly increasing their productivity and efficiency.”

“In the pharmaceutical industry, validation and data protection is everything,” states Kay. “For this reason, Logicalis’ ability to verify our server hardware and software installations, as well as our SAN and backup processes, matches our requirements perfectly. Industry inspectors are placing greater emphasis on data protection and network security. The changes Logicalis have made to Avecia’s infrastructure and external access have greatly increased the company’s ability to protect its data and consequently meet the demands of its customers and regulatory bodies. Logicalis’ penetration testing and firewall detection and prevention procedures have greatly increased our level of security and reduced our risk of audit failure.” Avecia successfully underwent FDA and MHRA inspections in January 2009.

The fast pace of today’s pharmaceutical industry sees new processes and techniques for clinical development and the manufacture of medicines emerging every week. It means companies like Avecia need to respond rapidly when implementing these core practices, whilst remaining compliant at all times. Avecia's decision to adopt virtualisation techniques and deploy an on-demand virtual IT team means they now have the agility to transform their IT estate as often as their business model changes.

“We’re currently working with Logicalis to improve our disaster recovery procedures,” says Kay. “With their help, we’re looking to move to a contingency model based on the virtualisation and SAN technology they’ve already helped us implement. It means we can use these technologies for data replication to an alternative site, dramatically reducing recovery time.”

The Future

Kay believes he and his team have developed an excellent working relationship with Logicalis – one that’s yielding continuous improvement. “We’re now benefitting from the virtualisation they’ve helped us achieve as we implement new applications and they will certainly continue to be a core part of that process,” he adds.

"This collaborative partnership means we're able to use today’s technology and Logicalis’ expertise to continue developing our infrastructure. What’s more, our ability to share their resources with other companies means we don’t have to pay for this level of expertise 24/7. This makes their managed service a highly cost-effective proposition for companies like us with only a small in-house IT team.”

Kay says Logicalis have become an integral part of Avecia’s IT support. “Their expertise in virtualisation and IS service provision means we have a partner on whom we can rely to help us address issues and, more importantly, prevent them through early identification and warning - rather than continually patching and upgrading systems, as was often the case in the past.

“At the end of the day, we can't afford the time to be continually looking over the fence at what technologies are coming along. Thanks to their technical knowledge and their close partnership with key players like Cisco, HP and Microsoft, Logicalis are now our eyes and ears on the industry,” he concludes.