MSD: Accelerating Drug and Vaccine Development Through the Cloud

How Trustsoft unified data access for MSD on AWS with Trino, Terraform, CI/CD, Superset and Ranger, making drug and vaccine development 5 to 10x faster.

About the Company

MSD, known as Merck & Co. in the US and Canada, is a global biopharmaceutical company developing medicines, vaccines and treatments for cancer and infectious disease. It operates in more than 140 countries and employs tens of thousands worldwide, with a Czech branch founded in 1992. MSD invests heavily in research and development, and increasingly relies on cloud and Big Data infrastructure to accelerate drug and vaccine development.

Abstract pattern of irregular large white ovals on a black background.

Challenge

MSD's Czech IT team, part of a global workforce of almost 8,000 IT specialists, needed to unify access across repositories, environments and Big Data databases, including security policy. Collaboration between teams was difficult, onboarding new teams took time, and analyzing large volumes of research data was complicated by inconsistent environments and system instability.

Difficult collaboration across teams
Inconsistent environments across the organization
Slow, complicated onboarding of new teams
Complex analysis of large research data
No automation of access or environment setup

Solution

Trustsoft first gathered information on how the teams develop drugs and analyze research results and drug efficacy, all running on AWS infrastructure. To unify access between repositories and Big Data databases, it implemented Trino from Starburst on AWS, and manages the entire infrastructure as code via Terraform for automation and faster onboarding. CI/CD handles automatic deployment of each team's environment, Superset was added for visualizing complex data, and Ranger was launched to manage permissions per environment.

Trino (Starburst) for unified access to repositories and Big Data databases
Infrastructure as code via Terraform
CI/CD for automatic environment deployment
Superset for visualizing complex data
Ranger for permission management per environment

Ready to Start Your Cloud Transformation?

Request Your Free Assesment

Benefits

Trustsoft continues to support and develop the system, which now runs stable at scale and handles complex operations and analysis with ease. After unifying the approach, global teams work far more efficiently, and drug and vaccine research and development is now 5 to 10 times faster.