Correvio Pharma Corp. is a Vancouver, Canada-based specialty pharmaceutical company focused on providing innovative, high-quality acute care medicines to physicians and patients in over 60 countries around the world.
Since June 2020, Correvio Pharma Corp. has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of ADVANZ PHARMA, a global pharmaceutical company, focused on being the leading platform for niche established medicines with advanced commercial capabilities in Western Europe.
With offices in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, and many remote employees, Correvio was facing some challenges with the high cost and lack of technical flexibility from its IT hosting provider. There was also a desire to increase security measures and reduce latency for users based in Europe.
Correvio wanted to get their IT server infrastructure closer to their Europe-based staff, with reduced operational costs and improved security measures. There was also a requirement to decommission a few legacy application servers which were out of warranty and were not previously migrated to the datacentre and start investing in a Disaster Recovery solution to ensure Business Continuity in case of a datacentre failure.
In August 2018, Correvio tasked Sofltanding with a Proof of Concept (PoC) project to design an initial Azure network and move legacy Virtual Machines (VMs) running on two Hyper-V hosts in the Vancouver office to Azure Europe West, in preparation to decommission their obsolete, out of warranty hardware.
The solution included a deployment of two Azure regions in Canada, and two regions in Europe, including Azure Site Recovery to allow for cross-region failover. The on-premises virtual machines first had test migrations completed to validate the applications ran without issue in Azure with zero impact to the production applications, they were then migrated to Azure Windows servers with all legacy applications being validated in Azure. Correvio wanted to use this lift and shift migration strategy as a Proof of Concept to better understand how the Azure cloud environment could handle the cloud migration of their twenty plus servers (Windows Servers and Windows Servers running SQL).
Following the successful Proof of Concept, Correvio returned to Softlanding in February 2019 to migrate the remaining servers to Azure Windows servers, leveraging Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for the migration. During this phase all remaining application servers were migrated from VMware hosting in Canada to Azure hosting in Europe, using Cisco Meraki vMX100 appliance to manage virtual networks and network security.
Reduced on-premises and datacentre infrastructure expenses
With 32 servers running in Azure across 2 regions, Correvio eliminated its on-premises compute and private cloud infrastructure, with a monthly cost reduction from $ 16,000 to $ 11,000. Parts of the savings were achieved by reducing excess disk allocations resulting from a previous physical to virtual server migration.
Scalability
With their servers now based on Azure, Correvio can scale up or down their Virtual Machines based on the needs and cycles in their business, including the ability to turn off servers which are only required for occasional access and adjust server resources to minimize operation costs.
Low latency
Applications have been migrated to the Azure region closest to the majority of end-users, providing improved performance for users in Europe, with only slight degradation for Vancouver users, following decisions made during the design phase.
Performance
Workloads can be scaled up or down depending on performance requirements.
Enhanced Security & Compliance
With Azure DR, data availability has been ensured in order to enable business continuity and protect against data loss.
Network security was improved by utilization of Cisco vMX100 network appliance providing consistency with rest of the corporate network.
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