Pharmacy Giant Migrates To AWS

Australian Pharmaceutical Industries has migrated its key billion-dollar online portal to the AWS platform. Reduced costs being cited as one of the reason, but another key factor are the outages.

Outages that plagued its previous hosting provider.

As reported, the company runs the MyAPI ecommerce portal where pharmacists can order over the counter drugs to narcotics that are heavily regulated — some 30,000 products are listed on the website, which are supplied to thousands of pharmacies all over the country.

The portal accounts for 50% of the company’s wholesale orders, worth more than $1.25 billion per year.

And this migration of MyAPI to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform marks the companywide shift for the pharmaceutical giant away from multiple hosting providers. As Dirk Bellmann, applications manager at API revealed:

“The only reason this did not move [earlier] was contractual. One of the benefits of AWS is you pay as you go – we used to be on a four-year contract.”

This migration has now resulted in cost savings of up to 20% for the company, not to mention the stability and reliability that a cloud provider like AWS can offer.

And that’s not even talking about the scaling benefits they get by moving their platform to the cloud.

For Australian Pharmaceutical Industries, this is a big change from a few years ago where it experienced outages that lasted more than 24-hours. So pleased is the company with its public cloud experience that it is now planning to migrate more of its workloads.