OMNYS Helps Werfen Consolidate Infrastructure and Improve Security Using AWS

Werfen is a worldwide leader in the areas of hemostasis, acute care, transfusion, autoimmunity, and transplant, with a focus on specialized diagnostics. It needed to transform its Italian IT infrastructure by consolidating its on-premises Oracle databases and improve its data security. Working with AWS Partner OMNYS, Werfen designed and executed a migration plan using AWS Migration Hub and AWS Database Migration Service. The migration consolidated its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and reported a 25 percent performance boost.

Family-owned Werfen is a worldwide leader in the areas of hemostasis, acute care, transfusion, autoimmunity, and transplant, and has a focus on specialized diagnostics. Founded in Spain in 1966, the company now operates directly in 34 countries with research, development, and production centers in the United States and Europe.

Hospitals are some of Werfen’s biggest customers so its instruments need to go through a rigorous certification process before they can be used. The company also needs to comply with strict data security legislation laid down by Italy’s National Authority for Cybersecurity.

Werfen’s Italian operations were being run from an on-premises data center in Spain. It had several mission-critical Oracle database instances and web applications. The company wanted to migrate to AWS because its services are accredited by the Italian government. As it didn’t have the in-house technical expertise to complete the transformation, it chose to work with AWS Partner OMNYS.

“OMNYS had worked with AWS and some of the largest pharmaceutical companies,” says Elena Lattuada, service director at Werfen. “This gave us a lot of confidence and they haven’t let us down.”

OMNYS developed a three-phase plan to consolidate, transform, and then migrate Werfen’s infrastructure to AWS. The first phase was about assessment, where OMNYS used the AWS Migration Hub, which provides tools to simplify migrations and modernizations on AWS.

The second phase used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to create a demo environment to help evaluate the feasibility and functionality of the migration process. During the third phase, OMNYS used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)—a managed migration and replication service that helps migrate database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and data loss. OMNYS also used AWS DataSync, a secure, online service that automates and accelerates data migration between on-premises and AWS storage services.

The decision to use AWS Migration Hub helped automate the migration process and save time. “More than 99 percent of the data and storage were automatically transferred using AWS Migration Hub,” says Davide Pozza, chief technology officer (CTO) at OMNYS. “The project took just 5 months and we followed all the AWS best practices and guidelines.”

Credit: Werfen

OMNYS migrated the Oracle database instances in the final phase of the project using Amazon RDS for Oracle, a fully managed commercial database that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale Oracle deployments in the cloud. The OMNYS CTO says the migration had to be seamless so as not to cause downtime. “We were migrating from Oracle 12 to Amazon RDS, which is Oracle 19,” says Pozza. “This was our biggest challenge and we made sure it was properly tested before pushing live.” Avoiding interruptions was also critical to the success of this migration. “OMNYS helped us migrate our Oracle databases and servers without any downtime—from a business point of view, it was perfect,” says Werfen’s Lattuada.

With the migration complete, Werfen discovered some unexpected but welcome benefits. Migrating from its legacy servers to Amazon EC2 resulted in a 25 percent performance boost. Werfen also noticed improvements in reliability, with a significant reduction in downtime compared to its on-premises infrastructure.

Werfen is now using AWS to manage the oral anticoagulant (blood thinning) therapy of about 500,000 patients, each requiring treatments about once a month. “We can focus purely on our hospital customers and not concern ourselves with applying patches or upgrading servers,” says Lattuada. “We are connecting more and more hospitals in Italy and, because we use AWS, we no longer worry about the infrastructure.”