Covid-19 has presented a health crisis the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the outbreak of the Spanish Flu in 1918. From January 1918 to December 1920, this virus infected an estimated 500 million people and killed around 50 million people worldwide. Covid-19 has infected around 600 million people, with over six million people losing their lives to the disease.
One of the reasons that Covid-19’s mortality rates were much lower was technology. Not only were we able to communicate the how, where, and why of the pandemic to help people stay safe, the development of vaccines was greatly expedited by modern equipment, knowledge, and expertise. As of the middle of 2022, more than 12.4 billion Covid-19 vaccines had been administered, reducing mortality rates and helping the world start moving back to pre-pandemic levels of “normal” interactions.
South African medtech company nuvoteQ was one of the businesses that helped to ensure that humanity could beat the virus. Providing a platform that allowed for the collection and analysis of the data countries needed to ensure effective vaccine rollouts, nuvoteQ was instrumental in providing a detailed analytical understanding of, and an expedited time to market, of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Data helping to save lives
In 2020, nuvoteQ was approached by a pharmaceutical company in India looking for a life-science clinical trials platform to help the world’s most populous country in its Covid-19 vaccine rollout. nuvoteQ’s electronic direct capturing (EDC) platform, designed for the collection of clinical data in electronic format, allowed for data collection to be streamlined, helping to expedite the vaccine’s time to market.
This EDC platform allowed nuvoteQ to repurpose a number of previous studies and their data, creating specific categories to help speed the process up, enabling the Indian pharmaceutical company to make decisions and deliver a vaccination strategy faster. nuvoteQ’s proprietary, Web-based software solution, called Nukleus, is hosted with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a result of the efficiencies offered by hosting the platform on AWS, nuvoteQ was able to deliver the clinical trials platform in two weeks — a process that would typically take eight to 12 weeks.
nuvoteQ chose AWS as its cloud platform for a number of reasons. Not only does AWS offer a wide variety of services that have been designed to decrease costs, improve operational and clinical efficiency, and ultimately enhance patient care, it makes compliance and data management much easier, regardless of which countries nuvoteQ’s clients are operating in.
Super-tuning the AWS environment
While the benefits of using AWS were immediately apparent to nuvoteQ, when the medtech company decided to invest in the cloud, it partnered with iOCO to ensure not only that the implementation was seamless, but that it was accessing all of the benefits AWS offered. Using in-house resources and AWS skills to help ensure its clients got the reliability, high-performance, and cost-effectiveness they needed, nuvoteQ relied on iOCO to help optimise costs, improve governance, and strengthen its cloud security posture.
As an AWS Well Architected Partner, iOCO helped nuvoteQ identify opportunities to save money and increase performance. Conducting a Well Architected Review, iOCO identified areas where nuvoteQ could gain efficiencies. The two organisations continued to collaborate closely across nuvoteQ’s AWS implementations, and iOCO was able to help the company to streamline processes to increase productivity, reduce cost and increase availability.
iOCO’s recommendations helped nuvoteQ improve resource utilisation, providing dashboards and reports monitoring how cloud performance, utilization, and cost are affecting nuvoteQ’s key business metrics at any given moment. iOCO also helped ensure that all of nuvoteQ’s cloud accounts and services are configured correctly to encrypt data, prevent unauthorised access to resources, and maintain regulatory compliance.
Without the scalability, security and compliance in its AWS solution, nuvoteQ would not have been able to expedite the vaccine rollout in India. The implementation of the AWS technology stack has also provided immediate benefits for the company, primary among which are the stability of the infrastructure and the cost-effectiveness the solution offers.
“Utilising the elasticity and robustness of the AWS infrastructure has not only helped us scale our platforms to over 20 countries globally, but have also given our customers peace of mind from a data security and redundancy perspective. We are excited to see where AWS will be taking the cloud space over the next five years,” says Adriaan Kruger, co-founder and CEO of nuvoteQ.
Benefits
- Stable infrastructure
- Scalability
- Security
- Cost-effectiveness
- Reliability