Customer Overview
A Pharmaceutical company is focused on delivering advanced finished dosage products driven by proprietary technology platforms, global infrastructure, and a robust quality system. Their strategy is aligned with the founder’s ethos of producing reliable and cost-effective pharmaceuticals with speed and agility. As of today, Customer has investments in three proprietary technology platforms for rapid dissolve tabs, the world’s first thermostable probiotics platform, and proprietary technology to extract and develop highly bioavailable natural products. Customer team is committed to fulfilling the demands of the world markets by anticipating the future needs and pioneering strategic new in-roads into the commercial pharmaceutical sector.
Business Need
Without appropriate configuration management tool in-practice, Customer faced several business challenges, including:
- Manual Management: Handling tasks like patching, configuration, and compliance manually can be time-consuming and error prone.
- Scalability Issues: Scaling operations efficiently without automated tools can be difficult, leading to potential downtime or performance issues.
- Security Risks: Ensuring consistent security policies across all systems without centralized management can increase vulnerability to attacks.
- Operational Efficiency: Lack of automation can slow down processes, affecting overall productivity and agility.
Considering the comprehensive requirements for managing their AWS infrastructure, Customer sought an effective AWS native offering specifically designed to enhance their configuration management practices.
Quadra at Work and solution design
Customer turned to Quadra to leverage AWS Systems Manager to address these challenges. Here is how the solution was implemented to optimize their IT operations:
- Fleet Manager: Implemented Fleet Manager to simplify and streamline the remote management of EC2 instances and other resources, offering a unified view of the infrastructure. This tool provided Customer with advanced capabilities for fleet management, including resource monitoring, diagnostics, and management, all from a centralized console.
- Compliance and Inventory Management: Leveraged AWS Systems Manager Inventory and Compliance services to automatically collect and update inventory data about Customer’s software and configurations within their EC2 instances. This ensured that Customer maintains compliance with their internal policies and external regulations through regular audits and effective inventory management.
- Systems Manager Parameter Store: Implemented centralized parameter management along with version control of parameter values using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. This allowed Customer to securely store, manage, and access configuration data and secrets, ensuring consistency and security across their applications and services.
- Centralized Management Interface: Provided a unified interface to manage the entire IT infrastructure, simplifying the complexity of operations and providing Customer’s IT team with a single-pane-of-glass view for monitoring, managing, and automating tasks across all AWS resources.
- Automated Patching: By utilizing AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, automated the process of keeping EC2 instances up to date with the latest security patches. This initiative-taking approach minimized vulnerabilities and ensured that Customer’s systems remain compliant with security standards without manual intervention.
- Run Command: Utilized AWS Systems Manager Run Command to execute administrative tasks securely and remotely on EC2 instances, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. This enhanced operational efficiency by enabling batch operations and reducing the time required for task execution.
- Enhanced Visibility and Monitoring: With AWS Systems Manager’s monitoring tools, Quadra has enabled comprehensive visibility into the operational health and performance of Customer’s EC2 instances. This included setting up CloudWatch metrics and alarms to facilitate initiative-taking issue detection and resolution, ensuring timely responses to potential issues and maintaining optimal performance across the infrastructure.
Quantifiable Improvements
Impact and Outcomes of AWS Systems Manager for Customer include:
- Automated Patch Management: Automated patching reduced manual effort by 85%, ensuring all instances were promptly updated with the latest security patches.
- Enhanced Configuration Security: Secure storage of configuration data in Parameter Store ensured 100% compliance with security policies, reducing the risk of data breaches.
- Improved Remote Access: Session Manager facilitated secure and auditable remote access, reducing the average time for troubleshooting and maintenance by 70%.
- Centralized Node Management: Centralized management of nodes reduced configuration errors by 90%, ensuring consistent and compliant configurations across all instances.
- Operational Efficiency: Automation of routine tasks led to a 75% reduction in time spent on manual processes, allowing IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Regulatory Compliance: Continuous compliance monitoring ensured 99.9% adherence to industry regulations and best practices, minimizing the risk of non-compliance penalties.
- Cost and Time Savings: Optimized resource management and reduced downtime led to a 20% reduction in operational costs and increase time efficiency.
