News
Amazon and Gilead Partner in the Cloud for Medical Research
Amazon Web Services this week announced a partnership in the cloud with Gilead Sciences Inc., a biopharmaceutical company.
Moving forward, Amazon will be the top cloud provider of Gilead, providing technologies like analytics and machine learning to help support medical research and treatment. "With AWS as our preferred cloud provider, our researchers can use AWS's portfolio of services to gain the insights, agility, and security needed to deliver new medicines at speed, and treat the individual according to their unique needs, not just the disease," said Marc Berson, senior vice president and chief information officer at Gilead.
Prior to the announcement, the two have already taken steps together in the cloud. In the past 12 months, Gilead has moved more than 50 percent of its data into AWS, thanks to the AWS Professional Services accelerated cloud migration program.
Gilead was also one of the first users of AWS for Health, a suite of analytic tools specifically targeted at the health care industry.
In the coming months Gilead plans to migrate hundreds of mission-critical apps, with Amazon's assistance in maintaining medical regulations during and after the migration. Also, Gilead will use Amazon for all of its workloads associated with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation project to implement SAP S/4HANA. This will be the first use of production-scale ERP systems in the cloud for the medical company. In a joint statement, the two companies described what this will mean for Gilead:
These systems support business-critical processes in areas such as supply chain, finance, operations, and commercial sales across all therapeutic areas and business units. Running these processes on AWS provides the foundation for Gilead’s implementation of SAP S/4HANA. It also helps the company shorten hardware refresh cycles, increase testing and deployment agility, and gain visibility to improve business planning.
The two companies also outlined how Gilead will leverage AWS for its IT needs to lower hardware and other on-premises costs, as well as creating an automated disaster recovery landscape.
Amazon said the elevated partnership was a great fit and Amazon wants to do what it can to help Gilead develop and distribute future treatment options.
"By streamlining their IT operations with AWS and taking advantage of our AWS for Health offerings, Gilead has the ability to continuously refine its approach to clinical trials, drug development, manufacturing, and distribution,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at AWS.