hVIVO is a rapidly growing, specialist contract research organisation (CRO) and the world leader in testing infectious and respiratory disease vaccines and antivirals using human challenge clinical trials.
It provides end-to-end early clinical development services for its broad and long-standing client base of biopharma companies.
Paul Beshaw is the IT Operations Director at hVIVO.
“What the doctors and nurses are doing here is so important, it’s crucial we give them what they need from an IT standpoint to make their lives as easy as possible.
“When a company is experiencing the rate of growth we are, the technology has to just work. For that to happen, we have to make sure it’s resilient and tested regularly. It’s also very important we make sure it’s fit for purpose on an application and hardware level . To the business, IT should just be a tool that they can use to do their job.
“We’re very IT-centric in the way that we operate. When a volunteer comes through the door they are instantly processed on a computer. The application we use for booking people in and booking all their results follows them around the building. Redundancy is so important when keeping track of patients and the work that the doctors and nurses are doing; without it, the fallback position is paper. It’s absolutely critical to the way we work.”
Paul and his team wanted to make sure that the Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions they had in place were held to the same high standards as other technologies.
“We had been with an existing supplier for backup for a long time. It was antiquated and somewhat clunky to use. Moving away from that supplier, gave us an opportunity to rethink how we use backups. How long do we actually need to keep backup data? And how can we simplify the recovery of that data?That was the impetus to begin to look at options in the marketplace.
“The Disaster Recovery solution came later. The reason we looked at Disaster Recovery was to understand what we would do in the event of a larger problem. The joy of being a business working in London is you just never know what’s going to happen next. We needed to have something in place so that if there was an event, it wouldn’t be cumbersome to get things working again quickly.
“Having Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and having the backups would greatly simplify that as a process. We could be quite assured that the information we needed to restore is available and easily recoverable.
If you speak with the team, they are still singing the praises of the technology to this day. Having easy backups and easy restores is going to be a win in any IT Department.
hVIVO selected Databarracks to provide BaaS and DRaaS.
“The solution covered everything we needed to do in two ways. Firstly, we needed to make sure the clinical or personal data we have on patients is encrypted, secure and in a very safe condition when it was backed up. This meant that if someone captured that data, it would be useless to them.
“From a DR BCP perspective, we needed to be able to quickly and easily recover data to the extent where the business was satisfied with what we had in place. We need to provide enough comfort to non- technical or higher management so that they also agree that this is the correct solution for the business.
“Databarracks helped us collect data back from the incumbent solution to ensure we imported a complete set of backup data. That was one of our biggest concerns, that we didn’t want to start from a certain point in time. All of that was collected and mopped up as part of the process.
“Of course, for any project, if you don’t have issues, it’s actually quite worrying because you’ll likely find them afterwards. When bumps in the road did appear, I was reassured by having options, workarounds or different ways to resolve the problem and we put all of those in place.
“I remember lots of discussion about how we’d back up database servers and how often we’d back them up. All those questions were very simply resolved. The team kept a running problem list, from week to week. These were very quickly resolved as we moved along with the project.”
“It’s easy to have faith in a company that has done this many times before.
You never really know that until you’re quite deeply committed to undertaking it. Questions we raised at the early part of meetings and negotiations were answered very firmly by the team who understood and were
able to provide a good solution to the things that we wanted.
“The largest benefit was actually the training, showing the new technology to the IT team here. You get a good feeling when the team is using the tech as to whether it is going to work long-term or not. There was very positive feedback from the team. It was a solution they could work with and they were able to undertake many of the tasks themselves quickly.
“We have someone who is very passionate about the environment here. And for our engineer to walk away happy, was a very good thing.
“Bob, the Project Manager was very good at tracking where we were with the project. It’s almost the uphill struggle of any Project Manager to get a final delivery point in on a project. He pushed us along and that was down to him, so that was absolutely brilliant.
“Now that we’re set up, it’s very much like the Homer Simpson ‘Everything’s Okay Alarm’. You don’t really want to hear that. What you do need to hear is when you have issues or problems.
“And actually, having the daily backup email coming in is great, as it’s a very visual and quick check. It’s an email where you want to see nothing there because you know everything has worked. It’s only the rare instances where some things overrun or it’s part way through, that you’re beginning to see information again. But the fact that it ‘just works’ is a credit to what Databarracks have done over time.
“If you speak with the team, they are still singing the praises of the technology to this day. Having easy backups and easy restores is going to be a win in any IT Department.
“In any type of clinical setting, there are several Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) we must adhere to. As part of that, we have to list how we undertake backups, restores and DR.
Our customers are very large, global pharma companies and they also want that assurance. They want to know that what we have in place, potentially for their date, is going to be kept safe, secure and is robust. I can happily sit in front of auditors and walk them through, not only the process, but also the application.
“We’re growing and so don’t always know what’s happening next. Working with a partner who is cloud-centric, makes that very simple. We’re trying to align the whole business with single solutions as we grow and this is a very easy solution to grow with us.”