Customer Profile
As a global biopharmaceutical leader, AstraZeneca focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of primary and specialty care prescription drugs. Operating in more than 100 countries and providing innovative medicines for millions of patients worldwide, this requires being curious, challenging conventional thinking and making bold choices to achieve scientific breakthroughs.
Business Drivers
AstraZeneca’s research and development teams within the organization’s three Science Units need to be able to work quickly and effectively to discover new drug products, and make sure 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, enabling researchers to collaborate more effectively.
The Challenge
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. As part of its new IT strategy, AZ is currently in the process of 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 promotes a mobile-first strategy that drives new partnerships and innovations within AstraZeneca,” said Ben Leadbeater, IT Project Manager at AstraZeneca.
Once a decision was made to migrate to the cloud, IT’s biggest hurdle was integrating the sheer volume of AstraZeneca’s document management systems with Office 365 and OneDrive for Business, 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.”
