How We Helped BC Cancer Lab use Azure Cloud in the Fight Against Cancer
How We Helped BC Cancer Lab use Azure Cloud in the Fight Against Cancer
THE CHALLENGE
Huge Data Volume Containing Vital Research
BC Cancer focuses on single-cell genome sequencing to develop targeted cancer treatments. Thus, its methodology created a lot of data, and it needed more storage and scalability than its on-premises environment provided.
BC Cancer needed a digital solution that would allow them to:
- Build a data management infrastructure for over 10,000 patients — cases diagnosed in Canada
- Develop a secure cloud infrastructure for a critical public health organization in Canada and worldwide
- Modernize cloud systems to become scalable for future growth
THE SOLUTION
Cloud Migration and Increased Collaboration
Our Approach
- The institute deployed Microsoft Azure, and runs its own machine learning models using Azure Virtual Machines and the scalable cloud platform.
- It began the Azure cloud migration of the majority of its 1 petabyte genome database with support from Invero.
- Azure Batch was leveraged to schedule the jobs required to process tens of thousands of files every 72 hours
Technology Used
- Microsoft Azure
- Azure Machine Learning
- Azure Batch
- Azure Virtual Machine
THE RESULTS
Secure for the Future
Increased Capacity and Decreased Costs
The BC Cancer lab now processes the high volume of data it needs, generating a terabyte (TB) of data a week and 400–500 TB of data a year. Previously, they would need to buy new hard drives and server racks regularly, but with Azure they have limitless computational power and decreased costs.
Scalability and Speed
The improvements in data management and analysis will help inform cancer diagnoses and treatments as research eventually moves into clinical applicability. Previously, they would get held up on processes for a year but now they can resolve tasks in less than a month.
Increased Security
BC Cancer works with highly sensitive data, and the lab needed to perform a locally mandated privacy and ethics review to comply with BC Privacy Commission rules. The lab is able to fully trust in the password-protected environment of the Azure platform.
