Myralis takes its SAP infrastructure to the cloud to ramp up innovation strategy
About Myralis
Myralis is a company in the pharmaceutical industry committed to creating innovative solutions to improve life, health, and wellbeing.
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About SantoDigital
SantoDigital specializes in providing services and solutions focused on cloud computing, such as digital transformation, infrastructure, Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
The pharmaceutical company had support from SantoDigital to migrate to Google Cloud, bringing cost reductions, improved usability, and stronger performance.
Results
- Completed the migration in three months, during the company’s peak sales period, with no system disruptions
- 100% availability rate since the migration
- Restore times for a SAP environment cut from hours to up to six minutes
- Cost reductions and improved performance, flexibility, and availability
SAP usability improved by 80%
Innovation is one of Myralis’s commitments in its quest to improve its customers’ health and wellbeing. The pharmaceutical company seeks to set itself apart both in product development and with its technology infrastructure to keep up with a consistent business expansion.
“We have had 40% CAGR [compound annual growth rate] over the past five years and our projections are very aggressive. Looking ahead, we must think about technology before the business area needs it, i.e., understand what we could do now to avoid pain later,” says Denis Carnevalli, Myralis’s Head of Technology.
Based on that strategy, the company decided to migrate its SAP infrastructure to the cloud. Myralis is currently using the ECC 6.0 model in the EHP 8 version and has SAP as the central management system for its industry, from production to finances. The software is also validated by the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) to ensure processes comply with pharmaceutical industry regulations.
From when it was implemented six years ago, the system was hosted in an on-premises environment that had become outdated. The infrastructure did not allow multiple actions to be performed at the same time without compromising performance. “The on-prem environment was failing to meet our needs on several levels, mainly performance. Reporting was taking hours, which had a huge impact on the business area. It wore down operations,” says Raul Xavier, the company’s cloud expert.
Moreover, the cost of updating the on-premises servers prevented Myralis from developing other important projects, such as creating a new physician-relationship platform. The company had to make a decision to change, innovate, and evolve, which led it to choose the cloud.
Migration at a critical time
As not many companies in the industry had migrated SAP to the cloud, Myralis’s team assessed smaller-sized providers to run a test, but could not find relevant success stories. The company quickly changed their plans after meeting SantoDigital, a Google Cloud partner.
“When we got in touch with SantoDigital and Google Cloud, we thought that, as a mid-sized Brazilian business, we might be just another company for them. That was not what we felt. We had a really cool talk with them about the future and strategy, and their welcome really differed from other partners’.”
—Denis Carnevalli, Head of Technology, MyralisSantoDigital showed Myralis a comparative analysis between what their existing environment provided and the resources and costs Google Cloud could offer. Once the project was approved, the partner supported the entire migration process. “SantoDigital’s task was to provision the environment and define accesses and settings as per Google’s best practices, so Myralis’s technical team could perform the migration,” explains Enrico Roman, SantoDigital’s IT Manager.
The process was marked by good collaboration and communication between the teams, who developed detailed plans to avoid any issues during execution. Early testing went so well that Myralis’s team decided to migrate right away, despite being in the company’s peak sales period. It worked. There were no disruptions in the system during the three-month migration process.
“The change was so marked that I conducted an opinion survey with SAP users and got several reports about how it had improved and gotten faster. Everything flowed in a very satisfying way for us and our internal customers.”
—Raul Xavier, Cloud Expert, MyralisThe project was validated by Anvisa in the three required rating types: installation, operation, and performance. Google Cloud and SantoDigital helped Myralis’s team provide all the documentation needed to prove information about the system’s configuration, availability, security, etc. “That documentation was crucial and was very well received by Anvisa, especially the SLA [service level agreement] and the location of the servers,” adds Xavier.
New paths on the cloud
The migration to the cloud completely transformed the way Myralis used SAP. The team reckons system usability improved by 80%, thanks to a high performance and low latency, even though communications run through a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Report generation, backup, and data restore processes were shortened from hours to minutes. Now, the company can restore a SAP environment in up to six minutes.
The new infrastructure, based on Compute Engine―a Google Cloud service for creating and running virtual machines―has also helped expand and streamline integrations with other services, such as the Finance Bureau or Myralis’s legacy environments. The company can now not only keep up with business demands, but also surpass productivity goals.
Decommissioning the physical servers has also helped avoid unavailability risks and save on operational expenses such as support and energy. In the past, any incident with the equipment in the company’s headquarters in Valinhos (São Paulo) impacted all its other units. “Once SAP froze for more than six hours due to a blackout. That is a scenario we no longer have to deal with as we have 100% availability,” the Head of Technology says.
Besides its SAP environment, Myralis has Google Cloud solutions in other areas, particularly data analytics and microservices. With support from SantoDigital, the technology team wants to go even further and increase innovation by adopting new tools in the cloud.
“To further increase the cooperation between Myralis, SantoDigital, and Google Cloud, we hold meetings frequently. This provides us with a space to talk about new developments and updates and hear Myralis’s ideas and questions. That is how we ensure an increasingly better path to take on new projects.”
—Júlio Figueiredo, Account Manager, SantoDigitalTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Myralis
Myralis is a company in the pharmaceutical industry committed to creating innovative solutions to improve life, health, and wellbeing.
About SantoDigital
SantoDigital specializes in providing services and solutions focused on cloud computing, such as digital transformation, infrastructure, Big Data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.