HIPAA Compliant Genomics Platform with Emedgene

Background

Emedgene is on a mission to unlock genomic insights for the world’s health organizations by providing data-driven AI solutions for genomic diagnostics and discovery at scale. They work with leading healthcare and life sciences organizations to power precision medicine programs, enable high throughput diagnostics, and accelerate research pace.

The Challenge

The continuous innovation of the genomics intelligence platform is heavily dependent on efficient data search and analytics capabilities.

To facilitate that, Emedgene deployed a self-managed Elasticsearch cluster on a number of virtual machines running on the cloud.

As the company rapidly grew, reliability and scalability became top of mind priorities. Consequently, the Emedgene team decided to adopt AWS to support the demand for growth. The managed AWS Elasticsearch services drastically reduce the operational overhead, enabling Emedgene to take advantage of the diverse set of AWS services to deploy to multiple regions closer to healthcare providers.

However, the Emedgene team soon realized that setting up on AWS, properly following the best practices of AWS while satisfying the requirements of HIPAA was a complex exercise. While it was important for the production to migrate to AWS rapidly because of the costs of operations, reliability and performance, it was equally important for the workload to be migrated with security best practices and compliance in mind.

Our Solution

OpsGuru was engaged partly because of the team’s demonstrable expertise on Elasticsearch, but more importantly, because of the wide-range experience in AWS adoption through the OpsGuru Cloud Launchpad.

The OpsGuru Cloud Launchpad is a templated cloud onboarding solution written in open-sourced Hashicorp Terraform. It sets up the AWS accounts in alignment with security best practices. With the OpsGuru Cloud Launchpad, Emedgene immediately acquires full audit capabilities. In addition to the technical capabilities that were enabled, Emedgene acquired network security and protection from external access.

Other than migrating the Elasticsearch workload to AWS Elasticsearch services, the OpsGuru team helped Emedgene adopt other relational data storage and services to enhance the system, including the adoption of Amazon ECS and Amazon ECS on Amazon Fargate for the different types of workloads.

While the migration was a resounding success, OpsGuru continued to assist Emedgene by advising on cost consolidation through the strategic use of spot instances and adoption of innovative storage solutions.

Both of these solutions led to significant cost savings of about 20% towards Emedgene’s operating costs.

The Result

By migrating the workload to AWS, Emedgene could continue building its core capabilities leveraging Elasticsearch using AWS Elasticsearch services without needing to continuously bear the management overhead.

Because of the OpsGuru Cloud Launchpad, Emedgene had gained a HIPAA-compliant AWS foundation that enabled them to continuously build new features and extend their customized AWS solutions for patient care globally.