Alexion: A Successful Migration of a Biopharma Corporate Data Center to the Cloud

Alexion is Under Investigation by the HHS Office of Inspector General

May 25, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

A few years ago, Alexion Pharmaceuticals , which was headquartered in Cheshire, Conn., moved to New Haven, about 30 miles away. At the time, Alexion was operating its own corporate data center on the premises. As part of the move, the company decided, as David Dill, Alexion’s vice president and chief technical officer, says, that it didn’t want to be in the “data center business” anymore.

“So we implemented a cloud-first strategy that looked at: How do we move out of an on-premise data center into a more flexible environment for hosting our applications and/or any servers we need to host,” Dill told BioSpace.

On Wednesday, Martin Leach, vice president, R&D IT, Enterprise Data Management & Analytics, Innovation, IT and ChoongTeik Ng, associate director, SAP Infrastructure, IT, both from Alexion, presented at the Bio IT World Conference and Expo in Boston on that case study in a talk titled, “Moving Our Corporate Data Center to the Cloud in 12 Months.”

Dill took time out to speak with BioSpace about the company’s shift to the cloud.

Alexion Pharma

Alexion focuses on rare diseases. Its products include Soliris (eculizumab), the world’s first approved terminal complement inhibitor, used to treat paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH) and atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS). It also markets Strensiq (asfotase alfa) for hypophosphatasia (HPP) and Kanuma (sebelipase alfa) for lysosomal acid lipase deficiency (LAL-D).

The company was founded in 1992, went public in 1996, joined the NASDAQ-100 Index in 2011, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index in 2012. It employs approximately 3,000 people worldwide. In 2016, Alexion reported $3.08 billion in total revenue.

The Move

Alexion had started in New Haven, then moved to the suburb of Cheshire, but chose to move back in 2012. One reason for the move was $51 million in state aid. It was part of what was dubbed the First Five program, which granted tax incentives to companies that create jobs in Connecticut. It was also a move to be back in a cluster of health care and biopharma companies in the city.

The challenge, Dill notes, was “we had 750 servers, which was a combination of our development environment, test environment, production systems including SAP. In addition, it included our unified communication landscape, which was Microsoft Office, as well as a large number of files in both SharePoint and File Shares.”

The goal was, Dill says, “to improve our agility and flexibility for providing computing capacity and applications across the environment to better serve our colleagues in the company. The second was to have more flexibility around our spend so we can more effectively manage our costs by not getting locked into fixed capacity. Also, we looked to leverage the competitive landscape of the cloud. We looked to move our workload to different providers to optimize our spend.”

They took a multiple-pronged approach, first assessing what they had and developed several RFPs. Dill says, “We did break up our landscape and went to a couple different environments, including Amazon, Microsoft and T-Systems, which is part of Deutsche Telekom.”

Challenges

Dill notes that there were at least three major challenges they faced. First was “just identifying our current inventory and who was using each of the applications in our environment.” Those included IT applications, IT servers, hardware and the applications running on it.The second challenge, he notes, was “around computer system consolidation and making sure we were doing this move and still maintaining the integrity of our systems and doing it in a compliant way.”

And the third was time. It would be daunting enough to close down a corporate data center and move it to the cloud without a clock ticking as the company was moving to a different headquarters. Dill says, “We were moving and wanted to return the facility back to the landlord, so we had a fairly short time window to execute the migration.”

Lessons Learned

The subtitle of Leach and Ng’s talk is “>725 Servers, >250 Million Files and a Lot of Lessons Learned!”

Dill points out that Alexion has moved approximately 90 percent of its computing capacity to the cloud, did it in 12 months, and, for the most part, it went smoothly. “We effectively did it in less than a year from start to finish. With any large project like this, there were technical and logistical challenges at the beginning until things were stabilized, but we were able to very quickly migrate our key systems and do it in a way that had a very minimal impact to our business.”

And he adds that moving data centers to the cloud is very much a trend, but what was different for Alexion was that they were running their own corporate data center on the premises—that and the imposed deadline of moving headquarters.

And the key lesson learned?

“For me, I think, the key is, even though the cloud gives people a lot of flexibility, agility and speed, you still can’t underestimate the amount of time, the planning and getting the organization ready for a fundamental shift in approach. It fundamentally changes how we plan, build and operate our environment. We had to make sure we did the appropriate change management with the IT organization, as well,” Dill says.

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