Accelerating the infrastructure migration of a MedTech acquisition

In late 2022, Norstella completed its merger with Citeline. Merging a global leader in applied healthcare data solutions with a leader in clinical trial intelligence saw the beginning of the world’s largest pharma intelligence solutions provider. Today, Norstella is leveraging Citeline’s solutions to prioritise innovation in drug development processes. This will enable patients to gain access to therapies faster

Norstella enlisted the help of GlobalLogic to migrate all its Amazon Web Services (AWS) from Informa to a new implementation of AWS Control Tower. This was one of five carve out streams that needed to migrate in four months, prior to the expiration of a Transition Services Agreement.

Customer Quote

“GlobalLogic provided a team of highly collaborative, seasoned experts committed not just to the immediate success of this project and its short timeline, but also to the long-term success of Citeline by providing exceptional documentation and continuous guidance on best practices that will shape our future infrastructure.”

— VP of Cloud Operations, Norstella

The Challenge

A Transition Services Agreement (TSA) established a fixed deadline for the separation from Informa, so delays in any migration would incur financial penalties and put additional pressure on the new leadership team in Norstella Group.

The project required GlobalLogic to consider the following:

1. The complexity of the business – Citeline was fully integrated into Informa PLC before the acquisition. Migrating AWS services to a new platform required delicacy, trust, and open communication to successfully carve out Citeline as a separate business. Any migration had to be executed with no disruption to either Informa PLC or Citeline’s current business operations and had to protect Citeline’s brand reputation.
2. Dependencies – GlobalLogic had to directly address any dependencies Citeline had on Informa PLC services and ensure parity and support was present and available in advance of the transition.
3. Internal and external customer experience – Whatever changes GlobalLogic made couldn’t disrupt the delivery pipeline of features or product enhancements. This was fundamental to both the customers’ accessibility to the product, and developers working on and supporting the underlying infrastructure.
4. People and skills – Before the acquisition, Citeline had access to Informa’s extended team of engineers and support services. Few Informa personnel transitioned to Citeline. This required an influx of specialist AWS skills to fill gaps created by the change in teams.
5. Multiple streams migrating at once – GlobalLogic was tasked with migrating one out of five in-flight works streams of work comprising 20 AWS accounts in total. Whilst each stream affected one another, either directly or indirectly, they were managed by separate teams with their own decision-making processes.
6. The role of PMO – To ensure project management standards were adhered to throughout the migration, GlobalLogic introduced the role of PMO to help standardise and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of the streams.

Tidy Devolution of Assets

All private equity investments require a tidy devolution of assets to ensure the success of the transition of an acquisition into its portfolio. This is especially true as organisations are increasingly choosing to simplify their technology estates and share the same tools and platforms across multiple business streams.

When migrating operations away from shared platforms, not only must private equity firms carefully untangle infrastructure and tooling from the previous organisation, they must also look at ways to align cultures, processes, systems, and teams with their existing portfolio or platforms. This helps drive operational improvements, synergies, and value creation, and nurture the remaining talent to ensure the portfolio company’s continued growth and success.

The Solution

Each team within Citeline has a different approach for how they utilise and manage AWS services. Documentation existence and quality is varied across these teams, requiring identification of Subject Matter Experts within each of the customer organisations to fill gaps in knowledge where documentation was not provided.

An audit was conducted to document the flow of data and traffic between applications running on AWS to augment the documentation collection, as well as a low-level analysis of the network to allow separation from shared services. Additionally, GlobalLogic held workshops with Informa to confirm findings and assumptions, and identify pain points that may need to be addressed as part of the migration.

Following the workshops, GlobalLogic led a series of touchpoints to enable dual running of migration streams. This helped formulate the migration plan by combining the information collected and mapping it to underlying Informa infrastructure affected by the Citeline carve-out and technical dependencies. This process was fundamental to the success of the project and was completed in line with industry and AWS best practices.

Identifying the need to orchestrate AWS services across multiple accounts, GlobalLogic deployed AWS Control Tower to support the migration of the infrastructure. This also served to prepare for future consolidation of AWS services within the wider Norstella Group. GlobalLogic also utilised Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Detective, AWS Transit Gateway and IAM Access Analyzer to maintain a secure, multi-account AWS environment.

These tools provided a consistent technology foundation while enabling customisable solutions for various work streams. GlobalLogic utilised Agile techniques and tooling to manage the migration to the new AWS environment, empowering the team to implement iterations highlighted in retrospectives and architecture reviews, and continually optimise process. GlobalLogic began with a pilot to prove the methodology and practice of the migration process. Subsequent iterations enabled us to iron out any issues before moving from pilot to non-production accounts to production accounts.

Benefits

A project of this complexity is expected to take 12-18 months. GlobalLogic’s experience with AWS migration programs enabled the acceleration of the project and migration of all 20 accounts within the four-month deadline. We are pleased to report that not only were there zero outages during the migrations, there were no interruptions to business-as-usual activity. In fact, the Citeline team successfully released a new product during the migration.

Zero distance to team

The criticality and time sensitivity of the project led to Citeline benefiting greatly from the locality of the UK-based GlobalLogic team. This made it possible for workshops and cadence calls to take place in-person when required. Our experience managing change with highly regulated industries enabled us to work with different stakeholders – even those outside the contractual SOW – and establish a common way of working across multiple business streams to deliver the project successfully.

GlobalLogic formed part of an extended Citeline team, coaching other streams through migrations and standing up a support framework for AWS services. The trust earned to support a broad team stemmed from the established partnership with AWS, the AWS Private Equity organisation, certified AWS engineers within the GlobalLogic team and a trusted relationship with another organisation within the Informa PLC group.

We look forward to working with Citeline following this successful migration on a second stream of work; remediation andmodernisation of its AWS platform.

Further information

All private equity investments require a tidy devolution of assets to ensure the success of an acquisition into its portfolio. GlobalLogic has extensive experience simplifying technology estates for private equity firms and their operating companies. We consider infrastructure and tooling, as well as the alignment of cultures, processes, systems, and teams. This helps drive operational improvements, synergies, and value creation.

Discover today.