Overview

Alexion is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on serving patients and families affected by rare diseases and devastating conditions through the discovery, development, and commercialization of life-changing medicines. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Alexion has offices around the globe and serves patients in more than 50 countries.  

Alexion Project Team: Venk Dakshin, Supriya Bakshi, Sean McCarthy, Rob Wdowik, Aidan Doyle

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

Alexion was in the process of modernizing its data architecture and building an enterprise-wide data governance program to derive greater business value from data. Alexion had a large, complex, and siloed data ecosystem. Additionally, data strategies and tools were fragmented across business functions. These challenges resulted in delayed data access, poor data quality, data duplication, and a lack of cross-functional collaboration. With IT spending exponential time on data management, Alexion needed a unified solution to provide complete visibility and control of data across the organization, facilitate their enterprise data governance initiative, and quickly deliver trusted data to analysts.

The Solution

Alexion built a cloud-based data platform by creating a data lake with Amazon EMR and a Hive-based data warehouse on AWS. Using Zaloni’s DataOps platform, Arena, Alexion could ingest, manage, and govern their data at scale while providing role-based access to business users through an enterprise-wide data catalog. Automated data pipelines within their cloud-based environment paired with a DataOps approach improved data supply chain efficiency and reduced costs. Alexion data consumers, such as data analysts and scientists, were provided with self-service access to reliable data, allowing them to request data instantly and gain access quickly, a process that traditionally would have taken months. By building the data foundation with the enterprise-wide data lake, Alexion is able to continually expand and achieve new use cases that drive business value.

The results

Alexion’s enterprise data platform provides end-to-end visibility and control of its data ecosystem, streamlines and automates data pipelines, and standardizes data governance to improve data quality while ensuring regulatory compliance. Additionally, the platform has transformed the way in which their data consumers (data analysts and scientists) accessed and viewed organizational data. In less than 3 months, Alexion had a global view of their data for commercial analytics and other beneficial use cases. With a smoother process that now allows consumers to access desired datasets themselves in a secure manner, consumers have more time to spend on answering pressing questions that may save the lives of those with rare diseases. 

Metrics

In less than three months, the company built and deployed a governed enterprise-wide data platform that was flexible and responsive while providing its users with a global view of their data enterprise. Alexion was able to roll out multiple use cases faster. BI teams experienced an influx in collaboration with custom analytics sandboxes, increasing data value while reducing compute cost. Through the secure, self-service data catalog, the company enabled and empowered diverse stakeholders to leverage data assets for actionable insights.

The Technology

Zaloni’s DataOps Platform, Arena, is a unified platform providing a holistic view across data environments and end-to-end data supply chain management to reduce costs and accelerate analytics. Arena’s compliance-ready governance framework uses AI/Ml for augmented metadata management to secure PII and sensitive information and increase pipeline efficiency. Arena improves and safeguards data assets, allowing self-service access for consumers to reduce reliance on IT.

Disruptive Factor

DataOps is an emerging data management methodology and Zaloni’s platform, Arena, provides the technology, enables processes, and facilitates employee collaboration to support enterprise-wide DataOps. Arena’s end-to-end capabilities range from data ingestion, data profiling, data quality, sensitive data masking/tokenization, data mastering, data provisioning, all through a single, unified platform. Zaloni integrates machine learning into the platform to streamline and automate data pipelines and master data from disparate sources improving organization-wide efficiency. For Alexion’s IT and business teams who are actively working with organizational data, Arena gives them an opportunity to spend less time finding and preparing data and more time working on use cases that pertain to their business goals.

Shining Moment

Implementing Zaloni’s Arena into Alexion’s everyday data operations allowed the organization to roll out multiple use cases. Consumers securely access high-quality data faster with the confidence to make innovative and informed decisions in their research and customer-related projects to deliver life-saving medicines more quickly than ever before.