Life & Soft has decided to switch from a traditional software publisher to a SaaS solution provider. TeamWork supported the company in its transformation to the cloud, setting up an adapted base on AWS and helping its teams to adapt to this new paradigm.
Founded in 2013, Life & Soft offers services, solutions and software in the bioinformatics and biostatistics sectors. The company also has its own sequencing laboratory. The company mainly targets the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, as well as diagnostic and research laboratories.
Over the years, Life & Soft has identified certain recurring needs among its customers, and has been able to offer them turnkey solutions tailored to the virology, microbiology and oncology sectors. The company began using the cloud in 2017, in particular to take advantage of the power and flexibility of these infrastructures.
In 2019, Life & Soft has decided to modernize its software development and distribution methods by making a shift to the cloud, through the construction of a SaaS offering. Making this transition a success, however, means overcoming a number of challenges, both technical and regulatory.
“Our move to the cloud raised many questions about infrastructure and access security, best practices and efficient deployment procedures, as well as the choice of services to adopt from the vast AWS catalog. We needed expert help on all these points. That’s why we approached TeamWork.”
Sébastien Henne
Developer and Technical Manager at Life & Soft.
Life & Soft has opted for Amazon’s cloud platform, AWS (Amazon Web Services), which is HDS (Healthcare Data Hosting) certified on certain datacenters, notably those in Paris and Frankfurt.
Streamlining the switch to the cloud
TeamWork’s teams began by assessing Life & Soft’s needs and maturity with regard to cloud technologies. “It was impossible to deal with all the issues simultaneously,” says Sébastien Henne. “What we appreciate about TeamWork is its ability to focus on strategic issues, so that we can deploy our solutions in the cloud as quickly as possible. We also appreciated the way TeamWork was able to spread the word within the company, explaining the challenges, the points of attention and the benefits of the cloud”.
First of all, TeamWork defined three major projects: the organizational aspect, the security aspect and the evolution of Life & Soft’s development model. Then, TeamWork helped Life & Soft evolve its development model by adopting containerization (using Amazon ECS and Amazon Fargate services), migrating from MongoDB to Amazon DocumentDB and opting for an infrastructure-as-code approach, using the Terraform tool.
Next step: strengthening Life & Soft’s cloud culture
“Implementing all these recommendations and solutions results in a significant reduction in IT infrastructure administration tasks,” sums up Sébastien Henne. “This represents a financial gain for the company, but it also brings comfort to our developers”.
A second wave of transformation is on the horizon, with the aim of furthering the adoption of best practices for making the most of the cloud.
“We have lots of ideas for continuing to modernize our developments, gain ever greater scalability and optimize the costs of our cloud infrastructures. More generally, we’ll be working with TeamWork to help spread the cloud culture throughout our company.”
Sébastien Henne
Developer and Technical Manager at Life & Soft.
Future projects will focus on modernizing developments further upstream, and further adapting certain services to consolidate the on-demand model – the key to a successful SaaS transformation.
