Cloud Data Lake for a Next-Generation Data Platform

As companies are modernizing their data architectures and moving from traditional data warehouses to data lakes, many are looking at a cloud data lake for their scalability and cost-effectiveness. Alexion Pharmaceuticals wanted to create a next-generation data architecture in the cloud by migrating their current data warehouse and by building a new data lake on AWS. A key requirement was centralized management and governance of data to create a next-generation data platform enabling self-service data access for their analysts. 

Challenge: Alexion develops leading pharmaceuticals to address pressing therapies, which often necessitate managing vast amounts of disconnected data coming from a variety of sources. The company wanted to migrate from their current data warehouse to AWS and build a new data lake in the cloud but were running into trouble trying to build the platform internally due to the complexity of their big data ecosystem. They needed a unified solution that could manage both their data warehouse and data lake. Alexion’s goal was for the platform to support various analytics use cases such as Provider 360 (the industry’s version of Customer 360) to improve sales and marketing effectiveness to healthcare providers.

Solution: Zaloni® helped Alexion create its next-generation data platform by building a data lake with Amazon EMR and a Hive-based data warehouse on AWS. Using Arena, Alexion was able to ingest, manage, and govern their next-generation platform while providing role-based access to business users through an enterprise-wide data catalog. Alexion also decided to leverage Zaloni® to manage the platform moving forward.  The following diagram outlines the solution reference architecture the company used for a cloud-based ecosystem.

Results: With the help of Zaloni and AWS, Alexion built and deployed a governed enterprise-wide next-generation data platform within weeks that was flexible and responsive while maintaining minimal operational costs. Through the self-service data catalog, the company enabled and empowered a diverse group of stakeholders within the organization to leverage data assets for actionable insights including Provider 360 views. They dramatically accelerated their time to analytics while reducing the time burden placed on IT.