About the Customer
Dawa Life Sciences is a Kenyan company with core competencies in healthcare; founded by Dr. Raju Mohindra and Dr. Ajay Patel in 1994 to provide better medication for humans and animals. Dawa manages their network of manufacturing and delivery of affordable, quality pharmaceuticals and animal health medicines across 10+ countries in Africa.
The Challenge
Dawa Life Sciences, as part of its continuous digital transformation, needed to upgrade its IT infrastructure to enhance operational efficiency. The company’s investment in SAP ERP and various peripheral systems required high-performance servers, which made building and maintaining a robust data center for both active and disaster recovery (DR) sites a costly endeavor.
In addition to the hefty upfront investment, the data center would drive up power consumption and demand a dedicated team of system administrators for daily management. Moreover, growth would be constrained by the available capacity, making scalability an expensive proposition.
Dawa Life Sciences experienced performance challenges and opted to migrate their workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Further, to enhance the efficiency and cost effectiveness of their infrastructure, an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) was recommended.
This review provided an opportunity to thoroughly evaluate their cloud setup across key pillars such as operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.
The Solution
By identifying inefficiencies, the AWS WAFR aimed to help maximize output, improve performance, and uncover opportunities to reduce costs. This strategic approach was essential for optimizing their cloud infrastructure while maintaining scalability and to stay within budget.
To enhance the performance and security of Dawa Life Sciences’s cloud environment, Silicon Overdrive implemented several key measures. First, Amazon CloudWatch dashboards were created to monitor critical services, with alarms set up to notify the appropriate team members in the event of any anomalies. A thorough review of IAM policies was conducted, and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) was enabled for all users. Additionally, access keys were rotated in accordance with AWS Security Best Practices.
Compliance and control objectives were documented, outlining data retention periods and establishing protocols for classifying sensitive data. To further align the environment to security best practices, VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config were configured to ensure visibility and auditing of network traffic, API calls, and resource configurations.
Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) and Security Groups were reviewed and adjusted where necessary to optimize network security. Encryption at rest and encryption in transit were enforced to ensure the secure storage and transmission of data, enhancing their overall security posture.
Finally, Silicon Overdrive redeployed instances and databases from public to private subnets. This transition optimized network performance and bolstered security by limiting exposure. The process involved meticulous planning and execution, ensuring minimal downtime and seamless migration. By assisting in this critical step, Silicon Overdrive significantly reduced the attack surface and enhanced the overall resilience of Dawa Life Sciences’s cloud infrastructure.
The Outcome
The AWS cloud provided a stable, scalable, and flexible environment with predictable costs, enabling the company to plan more efficiently. Additionally, Dawa Life Sciences benefited from AWS’s cost-efficiency, agility, and robust security features, which enhanced their overall operations.
Dawa Life Sciences was able to focus on its core business instead of investing heavily in physical servers, networking equipment, and data center maintenance. This transition enabled the company to shift IT infrastructure costs from a capex model to an Opex model where they only pay for what they need.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework review provided significant benefits to Dawa Life Sciences. It addressed all critical aspects of their cloud infrastructure, ensuring best practices in security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization.
Additionally, the review resulted in a $5,000 credit towards their AWS bill, further reducing operational costs and reinforcing the value of a well-structured cloud environment.
Dawa Life Sciences said, “Silicon Overdrive is an AWS premier tier consulting partner with a local office in Nairobi, Kenya. Partnering with Silicon Overdrive allowed us to have access to a dedicated and highly skilled team that thoroughly understands our environment. They assisted us to optimize our resources by enhancing the security of our environment plus minimize our monthly costs.
Through the local partner, we now pay our bills via invoiced billing in KES and with eTIMs receipts allowing us to seamlessly recover withholding tax. Silicon Overdrive is tax compliant, and this arrangement solidified our compliance with the revenue authority.”
See below a chart of Dawa Life Sciences reducing bills and timelines of other key events:
