AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Shaping the Future of Life Sciences with ZS’s ZAIDYN Platform Powered By AWS
By Kapil Nayyar, Global Leader, ZAIDYN – ZS
By Anshu Kapoor, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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Our world is more connected than ever, but in the dynamic healthcare ecosystem uniting data, insights, and technology remains a challenge many organizations are eager to solve.
For pharma leaders, medtech, and health tech innovators alike, the vision of connected health hinges on organizations’ ability to stay in tune with healthcare players’ preferences, perceptions, and expectations. Doing so helps companies create seamless customer pathways and proactively model, predict, and respond to the many outcomes of a changing healthcare landscape.
That’s why ZS collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build an intelligent life sciences platform—ZAIDYN—on cloud services.
ZS is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller with Competencies in Life Sciences and Data and Analytics. It’s a professional services company that helps companies across the healthcare ecosystem—and beyond—stay ahead of industry changes and deliver leading products and solutions.
ZAIDYN’s Role in an Evolving Healthcare Ecosystem
ZS’s cloud-native platform, ZAIDYN, gives organizations of all sizes the power to shape the future of the dynamic and evolving healthcare industry. Its analytics, algorithms, and workflows empower people to mobilize business strategies, connect insights and processes, innovate, and unlock discoveries that make a real difference in the lives of healthcare consumers, providers, and caregivers.
Designed to learn and grow with each client, the platform is modular, scalable, and fueled by global, cloud-based connectivity and a self-learning network. As more people engage, share, and build, the platform gets smarter—helping organizations fuel discovery, connect with customers, deliver treatments, and improve lives.
At the core of ZAIDYN is AWS, which plays a crucial role in ensuring the platform’s apps, algorithms, and intelligent workflows can efficiently mobilize organizations around information that illuminates trends and predicts patterns, preferences, and outcomes. Because the platform is built on AWS’s modular, integrated framework, companies of all sizes can plug in what they need, when they need it, and add more solutions as they evolve.
AWS’s Role in ZS’s Platform Journey
Before ZAIDYN, ZS hosted a suite of high-powered tools developed to meet its life sciences clients’ needs for advanced data and analytics, field force optimization, customer engagement, and omnichannel marketing. Some of these legacy tools were hosted on-premises, limiting the firm’s ability to evolve horizontally at scale and deliver companies greater functionality and connectivity.
“We knew that to help our clients innovate and grow in a changing healthcare ecosystem, we needed a platform that was as dynamic as the industry it serves,” says Sanjay Joshi, global leader of ZAIDYN.
Leaders within the firm sought a technology partner to help forge connectivity and create a cloud-native, modular ecosystem for all of ZS’s proprietary tools, intelligent solutions, data subscriptions and applications.
Harnessing the Power of Compliance and Efficiency
The decision to partner with AWS was deliberate and strategic. “Partnering with AWS was an easy choice,” says Abhishek Trigunait, ZS’s chief technology and product officer. “One of the many virtues behind joining the AWS platform was the data security and compliance checks we and our clients inherited.”
With a secure and compliant data foundation, ZS can continue to innovate and evolve its platform as new needs emerge in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.
Along with securely collecting and managing volumes of healthcare data, the firm needed considerable horsepower to run heavy data processing applications and advanced analytics that generate insights and fuel the platform’s self-learning network.
AWS helped ZS create secure connectivity between various data feeds, link artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, and create a dynamic, scalable model with interoperable data lakes that would integrate seamlessly with clients’ ecosystems.
Unlocking the Advantages of Compatibility and Cost Savings
AWS also produced significant cost savings, due to the dynamic nature of ZS’s infrastructure sizing.
“Within the first quarter, we were able to cut our costs significantly while deploying a multi-Availability Zone strategy that gave us full tolerance and full back-up,” says Sanjay Joshi, a global ZAIDYN leader. “This is huge for our clients because it means we can pass down cost efficiencies for them while maximizing the value of their existing tools.”
Additionally, because the majority of ZS’s clients and vendors are already on AWS, the move was universally beneficial from an integration standpoint.
“Adopting ZAIDYN as a next-generation SaaS model helps us integrate directly into clients’ ecosystems by leveraging cloud-native services like the client-hosted Amazon S3, AWS PrivateLink ,and AWS Marketplace, to name a few,” noted Abhishek Trigunait
Figure 1 – Field deployment provides an optimized field force, geographical view. and team comparison.
Seizing the Opportunity to Recruit, Retain, and Reskill Talent
“One of the most exciting benefits we’re seeing today is the uptick in upskilling, recruiting and retaining top talent,” says Sanjay Joshi.
Since launching ZAIDYN, ZS has amassed hundreds of AWS Certifications, earned a seat as an AWS Partner in the Data and Analytics and Life Sciences Consulting Competency categories, and continues to receive recognition for supporting a diverse and highly-skilled workforce.
Maximizing Cloud Power with Amazon RDS
ZS’s ZAIDYN platform uses many AWS products to fuel connectivity, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a cloud-native data service that helps ZS maximize all the benefits it gets from the cloud, including:
- Flexibility: Greater elasticity allows ZS to adjust its infrastructure availability based on demand across different geographies—a feature that empowers ZS’s life sciences clients to scale globally while adhering to data residency requirements with ease.
- Efficiency: The separation of compute and storage costs allows data volume and computing needs to grow independently of one another—resulting in significant productivity gains for ZAIDYN users and ZS clients.
- Support: A fully managed service from AWS eliminates the need to manage multiple servers, freeing up ZS’s IT resources to focus on client strategies and solutions. It also means that much of the backend database operations are managed by AWS, reducing ZS’s ongoing infrastructure operational costs while increasing the system’s availability.
Because ZAIDYN users inherit the same platform virtues, clients’ IT teams are empowered to focus on strategic work, experiment, or innovate rather than managing servers.
Advancing Operations with a Serverless Framework
According to Abhishek Trigunait, “serverless is one of the most advanced approaches to host services on the cloud.”
The AWS serverless framework allows ZS to host ZAIDYN services quickly, without worrying about server setup and infrastructure operations. With added cloud power, ZS can build and deploy services with greater agility, unlocking benefits like:
- Flexible scaling
- Pay for value
- No server management
- Automation, which ensures high availability
Solving Complex Challenges Requires Agility and Cloud Power
Today, life sciences companies are using the ZAIDYN platform to fuel innovation across therapy areas and clinical trial settings. Companies are connecting brands, technology, data, and teams around the globe and fueling customer insights that will help them reimagine and transform the patient journey and shape the future of life sciences.
With an intelligent, cloud-native digital platform to fuel progress, ZAIDYN represents a gateway to solving many more of the industry’s most deep-seated challenges:
- Scaling growth and innovation across geographic regions.
- Raising the bar for clinical research among diverse and geographically inclusive patient populations.
- Creating experiences customers truly value.
- Delivering on the promise of real-world data and evidence.
What the Platform Approach Means for Life Sciences
The life sciences industry is heading towards a platform approach. Within the next decade, digital life sciences platforms are likely to become mainstream, ushering in a new era of interconnectivity and agility across the healthcare ecosystem.
This is an exciting time for life sciences leaders because they now have the tools to innovate and evolve at scale in an industry that has long struggled to bring its digital transformation, patient-centricity, and connected health ambitions to fruition.
With a platform built on AWS, life sciences organizations can harness the power of a self-learning network that helps companies learn as they grow. This enables them to transform seamlessly, and to innovate and explore partnerships without rebuilding or reconfiguring their infrastructure or data management strategy at every turn.
Figure 2 – Customer 360 screenshot shows the seamless synchronization of data from both digital and non-digital channels.
Fueling Growth and Compliance in a Dynamic Industry
For every player the healthcare ecosystem, two forces remain constant: compliance and change. Whether you’re at the helm of a global pharma organization, launching a new therapy, forging connections across the healthcare ecosystem, reimagining clinical trials, or innovating in the medtech space—success hinges on whether you can learn and grow with an industry in flux.
That’s why ZS made the strategic decision to build its platform on AWS. With a flexible, secure, and compliant data foundation, ZAIDYN has the power to unlock insights healthcare organization need to innovate, grow, and engage people in meaningful ways.
Cloud-native storage services like Amazon Aurora enhance security, efficiency, and flexibility, and allow IT teams to focus on strategic work—a virtue that helps companies attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive field. With AWS at its core, ZS’s intelligent digital platform has the power to help life sciences organizations shape the future.
Conclusion
ZS is a professional services firm that works side by side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. Leveraging deep industry expertise, leading-edge analytics, technology, and strategy, ZS creates solutions that work in the real world.
To see an intelligent life sciences platform in action, visit zs.com/zaidyn.
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ZS – AWS Partner Spotlight
ZS is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and professional services company that helps companies across the healthcare ecosystem—and beyond—stay ahead of industry changes and deliver leading products and solutions.