In 2009, BIAL launched the first nationally patented drug, a historic milestone for the Portuguese pharmaceutical industry, which is already on the market in several European countries and the USA. In 2016, BIAL launched its second proprietary research drug, a new treatment for Parkinson's Disease.
Today, BIAL's medicines are sold in more than 55 countries. The company aims to continue providing innovative medicines and strengthen its international presence.
The challenge
According to Rui Rodrigues, BIAL's Director of Information Systems, "Our path of evolution has led to the need to modernize our technological infrastructure, so that we can develop larger projects and ensure the sharing of information between all the group's units. In order to do this, we needed to free ourselves from the internal management of the technological infrastructure and start using the technological resources in a more flexible and appropriate way for the growth of the business, guaranteeing support for the evolution of our operations at group level."
The solution implemented
Migration and virtualization of BIAL's technological infrastructure to the Altice Data Centers in Covilhã and Lisbon.
Data center services: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), Centralized Backup, Monitoring/Reporting and Disaster Recovery solution.
Project completed within 6 months.
The results achieved
According to Augusto Martins, head of Data Center operations, "with the migration of our technological infrastructure to the MEO Empresas cloud, we started using our IT resources as a service, from Altice's Data Centers. These are managed by specialised and dedicated teams that ensure, at all times, the best conditions in terms of hosting, capacity and security for our information systems.
In a cloud environment, we can remotely provision, via an online portal, the IT resources we need in terms of servers, software, computing resources and storage space, increasing or decreasing these resources according to the evolution of our business.
The flexibility and speed with which we can configure and access resources in a virtual environment allows us to easily integrate new projects and create new research units, even in new geographies, knowing that we have immediate access to the technological means critical to our activity, at controlled costs.
At the same time, we are able to guarantee permanent control of the availability and performance of our systems, through online access to service indicators and metrics that we monitor in real time, and which allow us to know the level of performance, efficiency and optimisation of our IT resources.
In addition, all updates and upgrades to the infrastructure are carried out centrally and are available immediately, without any worries or added costs.
Another important aspect concerns the privacy and integrity of technical information. For a company that produces and analyses a large amount of clinical data every day, the accessibility, security and confidentiality of this data are fundamental aspects.
At Altice's Data Center in Covilhã, we guarantee the high security of our systems and data. MEO Empresas also ensures the replication of our critical information in a second Data Center in Lisbon, guaranteeing, in any event, the recovery of our systems and the continuity of operations.
With this development, not only do we no longer have to worry about the costs of hosting, maintaining and updating the technological infrastructure, but we always guarantee the necessary resources so that we can continue to evolve and develop new therapeutic areas, without constraints and with total cost control," concludes Augusto Martins.
Main benefits
- Focus on core business
- Centralization and security of IT infrastructure
- Technological resources permanently available and aligned with the evolution of the business
- Rationalization and control of IT costs
- Maintenance and updating of the infrastructure ensured by specialised and dedicated teams