Mission Leads Ultivue Through Successful AWS Cloud Transformation

Undergoing rapid growth and facing increasing performance and scalability needs, the biotech company tapped Mission – on a recommendation from AWS – to drive its cloud migration

LOS ANGELES – April 17, 2019 – Mission, a managed services and consulting company for Amazon Web Services (AWS), today announced a successful engagement with Ultivue – a venture-backed developer of reagent-driven solutions for high-performance biological imaging in situ – to lead the business’ transformation from on-premises IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud.

Ultivue’s cloud transformation was triggered by its growth, which was causing the biotech’s on-prem IT infrastructure to exceed capacity faster than anticipated. The existing setup was leading to slower application response times, and there was a clear need to scale storage resources more quickly. At the same time, Ultivue was nearing the launch of a new InSituPlex® tissue analysis service offering that would add more than a petabyte of data annually to an on-prem storage system handling 80 terabytes (total) at the time. For these reasons, Ultivue wanted to rapidly expand its compute resources and introduce a scalable storage capacity that could grow alongside its business. The biotech also needed to assure data availability by introducing streamlined automatic failover to backup infrastructure in case of any failure, and archival storage that would deliver quick access to historical research and analyses.

Recognizing that it could address these requirements by migrating its infrastructure to a greenfield cloud environment, Ultivue chose AWS with the help and the advice of its primary investor and to achieve congruence with an image analysis vendor already leveraging AWS. Ultivue then selected Mission as an AWS solution partner recommended by AWS. Ultivue was impressed with Mission’s AWS roadmap, and its clear understanding of Ultivue’s cloud and business goals.

AWS delivers tremendous benefits to healthcare life sciences (HCLS) organizations like Ultivue, providing the infrastructure to utilize powerful, reliable, secure, and cost-efficient cloud solutions. At the same time, Mission has proven itself an ideal provider for HCLS organizations undergoing cloud transformations, and holds AWS Competency Partner statusin both Healthcare and Life Sciences. The Competency Partner status is granted to AWS Partners who demonstrate technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas.

Mission collaborated closely with Ultivue and its key IT partners to design an AWS architecture that would meet the biotech’s exact requirements. An early success included a faster-than-expected migration from internal server databases to MySQL on AWS RDS, which also utilized multi-availability zones (AWS Multi-AZ) and automatic failover to safeguard availability. Additionally, Mission ensured a seamless transition to the new computing environment, providing Ultivue’s end users with their own secure virtual desktop in AWS WorkSpaces.

Using AWS has allowed Ultivue to avoid the substantial upfront costs of building an on-prem data center. Mission configured nodes to automatically spin up as needed to ensure high performance whenever load increases, and to spin down to reduce cloud costs when unneeded. Mission has also synchronized Ultivue’s cloud infrastructure with the on-prem environment to provide end user access to all historical data. And, due to Mission’s managed service and support, Ultivue’s cloud deployment has generated consistent application performance even as usage has tripled.

“If we’d tried moving to AWS without Mission, it would have taken at least three times longer,” said Doug Wood, Principal Software Engineer, Ultivue. “It’s also more likely we would have made mistakes along the way that would have further extended our go-live timeline; that’s certainly one of the key reasons for working with AWS experts like the team from Mission. Now with our AWS infrastructure, our cloud footprint grows as our needs grow – and with Mission’s support we can easily adapt to meet any future needs with them going forward.”

“Our team features an exceptionally deep understanding and expertise when it comes to driving successful AWS cloud transformations for healthcare and life sciences businesses,” said Glenn Grant, President, U.S. East, Mission. “It’s been an honor to work alongside Ultivue creating their new AWS strategy – one that’s designed to bring the performance, scalability, availability, and cost savings to enable the biotech company to grow with confidence.”

Customers can connect with Mission and explore its offerings – including free on-demand consultations with AWS-certified solutions architects – at missioncloud.com

About Mission

Mission is a trusted managed services provider and consulting partner for businesses using – or migrating to – Amazon Web Services (AWS). Through its dedicated team of expert cloud operations professionals and solutions architects, Mission delivers a unique breadth and depth of AWS-recognized technical and strategic proficiencies. Mission combines this know-how with an anything-is-possible belief in the power of cloud transformation through AWS, and a dedication to understanding and solving customers’ individual goals and challenges – enabling their development of new and powerful applications running on the AWS Cloud. Follow Mission onTwitter and LinkedIn.

About Ultivue

By developing novel, proprietary reagents used both for biomarker discovery (higher content, low throughput) and translational use (lower content, high throughput), Ultivue is connecting the insights gained from research directly into the pathology lab. Ultivue’s UltiMapper™ multiplexed assays applied to tissue biopsy samples enable simultaneous quantitation of multiple biomarkers with sub-cellular spatial resolution and fit completely within traditional IHC workflows. Translational and clinical researchers leverage UltiMapper™ assays to elucidate complex biology and demonstrate their clinical utility as precision medicine research tools. Ultivue is expanding its UltiMapper™ assay product portfolio and menu of contract research services to provide a comprehensive set of personalized medicine solutions for research in oncology research and other therapeutic areas.

For Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.

Ultivue is based in Cambridge, MA. To learn more, visit www.ultivue.com