AWS supports the medical data exchange solutions offered by Lifen

Founded in 2015, Lifen facilitates the deployment of digital solutions to hospitals, doctors and patients by simplifying the sharing of medical data. Supported by its expertise as a leader in interoperability and Artificial Intelligence, Lifen has created a platform which structures data, enables electronic patient files to be supplied quickly and effectively and radically simplifies the technical integration and operational deployment of e-health solutions in hospitals’ electronic systems.

The objectives of medical data in the cloud

As soon as AWS obtained HDS (health data hosting) certification, Lifen had full peace of mind to start gradually migrating towards this host and so take advantage of a wide range of new services which reinforcing its existing offer. "AWS has a complete service offer which covers additional hosting services, virtual machines and storage, among other features”, says Dali Kilani.

The quick reactions and the assistance we received from AWS’s teams during this migration also proved to be strategic, both on a technical level and on a regulatory level (health Ségur, European regulations) and helped to build up a real relationship of trust between Lifen and AWS. One figure highlights this reliability and trust: Lifen has been able to meet its commitments (Service Level Agreements) to its customers over the last 36 months, without fault.

For Lifen’s teams, medical data security is a crucial element in their joint operations with health establishments. AWS provides a concrete response to this priority: the AWS cloud has been in existence since 2006 with the most secure and flexible cloud computing environments of the time. In addition, services such as the AWS CloudHSM and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) enable key encryption to be generated and managed in complete security. Finally, AWS covers more security standards and compliance certifications than any other, in particular PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2 and NIST 800-171, which enables customers to meet the compliance requirements of every regulation body around the world.

"Lifen is an ambitious company, with serious international aspirations. We were looking for a hosting provider who could provide us with advanced security certifications in different geographical areas in order to facilitate our development”, continues Dali Kilani.

Moreover, having AWS’s servers located in the Paris region enables Lifen to meet its contractual commitments to its customers concerning the location of medical data, which must remain in France.

From a financial point of view, Lifen has been able to optimize its costs thanks to the expenditure monitoring tools provided by AWS, but above all it has been able to take advantage of a whole host of services “which would cost must more from hosts of the same size as AWS”, according to Dali Kilani. One fact provides a perfect illustration of the financial and operational gains. "Traffic has increased by a factor of twenty five for our "Interoperability-as-a-Service" offer. Despite this, we have been able to control our cost scope by using the right types of instance and by taking advantage of Spot-type instances. This cost optimization is reflected in our prices, which defy all competition”.

One other factual element for Lifen is “The size of our DevOps team which is in charge of infrastructure has not changed - whereas our activities have quadrupled. This is due to the managed services and the reliability of AWS’s services”, emphasizes Dali Kilani.

Effective and reliable services which generate added value

Several AWS services have enabled Lifen to increase its agility and competitiveness. Among these are Amazon RDS which enables Lifen to delegate continuous backup management for all production, customer and other data. For Big Data, Lifen uses Amazon EMR which enables the flows which pass through their infrastructure to be processed in real time, in order to construct a datawarehouse on Redshift. This enables Lifen to have a view over its activities and to provide feedback to their customers on how to manage their own activities. One other significant element for Lifen: the managed services. In this respect, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has proven itself to be particularly relevant in managing Kubernetes applications.

The diversity and complementary nature of the services along with the automation that AWS provides mean that Lifen can concentrate on its core business. These services help to make Lifen more competitive in commercial terms and more effective and agile with products that are built on solid foundations. The reliability of AWS’s services reinforces the factors that enable Lifen to stand out from the crowd. "We have been able to provide "Interoperability-as-a-Service" which has been a huge success, thanks, among other factors, to the use of AWS services. These services have meant that we don’t need to worry about load increase issues. Our growth is continuing without any infrastructure constraints, as we can now concentrate more on the parts which generate added value, and less on those that we can delegate to AWS as service providers”, confirms Dali Kilani.

AWS: vital support in Lifen’s innovation culture

Innovation is one of the pillars of Lifen’s culture. In a booming sector, the company does not hesitate to test new products and services regularly via proof-of-concepts, in order to collect users’ opinions. This culture takes full advantage of the AWS platform, as it enables Lifen to eliminate all constraints related to storage, performance levels, availability and types of server, as well as bandwidth.

“We are always trying out new things. AWS’s tools enable us to build quickly and make our ideas available to our customers, while resting on solid technical foundations. Thanks to AWS’s services, we have been able to grown without any major infrastructure difficulties. AWS has been able to provide us with increased reliability and SLA commitments (contractual commitments drafted by AWS for the performance level of its services to users) which are vital for the services that we provide, despite a regulatory framework which is constantly changing, which has helped to reassure our customers and strengthen our credibility with them". Dali Kilani, Chief Technical Officer at Lifen.