MTP Connect

MTPConnect is a not-for-profit organisation which aims to accelerate the rate of growth of the medical technologies, biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals sectors to achieve greater commercialisation and establish Australia as an Asia-Pacific hub for MTP companies. It was formed as part of the Federal Government’s $250 million Industry Growth Centres Initiative.

The Challenge

Exigence IT was given a unique opportunity to design a greenfield IT infrastructure for MTPConnect. The requirements were different to the traditional head office and branch office model, as the MTPConnect's offices are based in existing leased university facilities in three states, greatly limiting what equipment can be deployed. Installation of a traditional on-premise IT infrastructure that calls for a dedicated server room and the associated services is not possible.

Exigence was tasked with designing and implementing a highly scalable IT infrastructure to facilitate day-to-day business and productivity services using cloud technologies, and ensuring a strong emphasis on security, mobility, control and regulatory compliance. This included services such as email, shared calendars, instant messaging and file sharing/collaboration.

The Solution

Exigence developed a solution to these challenges by leveraging Microsoft's Office 365 public cloud services in combination with infrastructure as a service offering from Amazon Web Services. The resulting IT infrastructure is effectively a virtual private data centre, without any significant capital investment.

This cloud infrastructure is different to the usual approach taken whereby the cloud provider controls security. Exigence's approach was to take the ownership of security away from the cloud provider by encrypting the entire infrastructure, with the encryption keys held by MTPConnect, as well as management and control of data backups. Furthermore, all data is geographically locked and protected by Australian privacy laws.

The Result

The new innovative design created by Exigence allowed for integration of multiple cloud-delivered services under one regulated and controlled IT infrastructure. It is fully encrypted, highly resilient and easily accessible from anywhere in the world using a single sign-on authentication service.

This project means that new Australian medtech, biotech and pharma organisations can now commission complex and secure IT infrastructures without any associated capital expenditure. These can be geographically data locked, encrypted and regulated, and implementation can all be accomplished in a minimal amount of time. Furthermore, the organisation only needs to pay for resources needed at the current time, as future capacity and services can be dynamically added or removed as needed, thus offering flexibility and minimising costs. The cloud-based environment still offers the familiar desktop environment to end users and is accessible from anywhere in the world.

This solution would also be useful for organisations with existing on-premise IT infrastructure who wish to transition to the cloud to avoid hardware refresh and upgrade cycles, with services that can be easily commissioned including:

• Email and calendaring
• Instant messaging
• Document storage and collaboration
• Databases
• Network firewalls
• Antivirus and malware protection
• Backups and archiving
• Full security audit trails

To find out how we can help you with your IT challenges, get in touch.