Amazon Web Services announced this week a partnership with Gilead Sciences Inc. (a biopharmaceutical firm) in the cloud.
Amazon will continue to be the top cloud provider for Gilead, offering technologies such as machine learning and analytics to support medical research and treatment. Marc Berson, senior vice-president and chief information officer at Gilead, stated, “With AWS being our preferred cloud provider,” that AWS’s services can be used by our researchers to gain the insights and agility needed to deliver new medicines quickly and treat each individual according to their unique needs.
Before the announcement, both had already made progress in the cloud. Thanks to the AWS Professional Services Accelerated Cloud Migration Program, Gilead has successfully moved more than 50% of its data into AWS over the past 12 months.
Gilead was also among the first to use AWS for Healthcare, a suite aimed at the health care sector.
Gilead will migrate hundreds of mission-critical apps to Amazon in the coming months. Amazon will also help with medical regulations after and during the migration. Gilead will also use Amazon to handle all its workloads related to its enterprise resource planning transformation project to implement SAP 4HANA. This will be the first time that a medical company has used a cloud-based ERP system in production. The two companies shared their thoughts on what this means for Gilead in a joint statement.
These systems support critical business processes such as supply chain and finance, operations, and sales across all therapeutic areas. These processes are the basis for Gilead’s SAP S/4HANA implementation. This helps Gilead reduce hardware refresh cycles, improve testing and deployment agility, gain visibility into business planning, and how Gilead will use AWS to meet its IT needs. AWS can also be used to lower hardware costs and create an automated disaster recovery environment. Amazon stated that the partnership was a good fit and will do everything it can to help Gilead create and distribute future treatment options.
“By streamlining their IT operations using AWS and taking advantage our AWS for Health offerings Gilead can continuously refine its approach towards clinical trials, drug design, manufacturing and distribution,” stated Matt Garman, senior vice-president of sales and marketing at AWS.
