Customer Profile
As a global biopharmaceutical leader, AstraZeneca focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of primary and specialty care prescription drugs. AZ operates in more than 100 countries and providing innovative medicines for millions of patients worldwide. Because of their large scale, they must remain curious, challenge conventional thinking and make bold choices to achieve scientific breakthroughs.
Business Drivers
AstraZeneca has research and development teams within the organization’s three Science Units. Furthermore, these teams need to be able to work quickly and effectively to discover new drug products. Therefore ensuring those medicines get to patients in the most efficient way possible. In order to focus on science rather than process, AZ’s IT Department decided to implement a cloud-focused IT strategy. Ultimately, this enabled researchers to collaborate more effectively.
The Challenge: Migrate On-Premises File Shares to OneDrive
With AstraZeneca’s 70,000+ users accessing content from hundreds of datacenters across the globe, it was a challenge to get the right documents into the right hands in a timely manner. Therefore as part of its new IT strategy, AZ is moving its on-premises content into Microsoft’s Office 365 and OneDrive for Business.
“Moving into Microsoft’s cloud-based platforms will improve the Science Units because it enables our researchers to collaborate easily. As well as promote a mobile-first strategy that drives new partnerships and innovations within AstraZeneca,” said Ben Leadbeater, IT Project Manager at AstraZeneca.
A decision was made to migrate to the cloud. Now IT’s biggest hurdle was integrating the sheer volume of AstraZeneca’s document management systems with OneDrive for Business. Additionally, to be able to do it without interrupting business operations.
“We had over 100 document management systems in our infrastructure. Which led to all sorts of confusion,” said Luke Temple, Services Design Architect for Enterprise Collaboration Tools. “Getting all of that into OneDrive has been our biggest challenge.”
