About OUCRU
OUCRU, part of the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), is a large-scale clinical and community health research unit with offices in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Nepal. Established in 1991 with the collaboration of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, OUCRU is currently partnering with major hospitals such as the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, the Central Institute of Tropical Diseases, the Patan Academy of Health Sciences, and the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology.
With a mission to positively impact local, regional, and global healthcare through research programs focusing on infectious diseases in Southeast Asia, the application of modern technologies in deploying application systems is an essential requirement.
Understanding the importance of technology application
To support the medical team at partner hospitals in easily monitoring and assessing the medical conditions of each patient in a timely and accurate manner, the OUCRU team has developed an information processing application for this purpose. However, in the initial stage, the application was entirely placed on-premises. This raised many issues, such as the system not meeting performance requirements, difficulties in scaling and upgrading, especially in managing physical infrastructure.
Understanding the importance of applying advanced technologies and meeting the increasing demand for processing AI research data, OUCRU's leadership unanimously agreed to transition the system from an on-premise environment to the Cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen by OUCRU as the platform for hosting the application infrastructure. To carry out this process, OUCRU sought reputable service providers in the region and selected CMC Telecom to accompany them in the entire process from consultation to system migration.
Hybrid Solution for Information Processing System on AWS
From the perspective of the system operations technical team, the OUCRU IT team has put forward the requirement to connect the multi-point system, ensuring stability and security during transmission. The most crucial part of this is the process from receiving requests from users, who are doctors, then the machine learning processes, information processing, data validation, and finally returning results to end users. Alongside OUCRU, the Solution Architects team from CMC Telecom has collaborated to provide options that best fit OUCRU's requirements.
Given the continuous access nature of the application for retrieving medical records, ensuring that the solution can handle high-frequency access with no downtime is a critical challenge for the technical teams of both OUCRU and CMC Telecom. Simultaneously, the system built on AWS needs to connect to OUCRU's applications quickly and instantly with extremely low latency.
Data Security Takes Top Priority
As a unit engaged in clinical research, research on patients, and the entire community, the data processed by OUCRU is highly sensitive personal data. With the guidance of CMC Telecom, OUCRU wisely chose to use AWS Cloud, a service provider that fully meets top security standards, ensuring data safety and information security factors.
CMC Telecom also advised OUCRU to use the AWS Site-to-Site VPN solution to provide multi-point connectivity between infrastructures with optimal costs, while encrypting data during transmission (Encrypt Data in Transit).
In addition, OUCRU's deployment of a Hybrid Cloud multi-point connection model fully complies with the Vietnamese government's Decree No. 53 on storing data in cyberspace.
Continued Expansion and Growth for Future System Conversions
Moving to the cloud has triggered operational changes, driving the demand for new approaches to build, operate, and manage applications. With the strength of AWS in providing Cloud infrastructure solutions, using AWS has helped OUCRU optimize infrastructure efficiently.
With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) combined with the use of AWS CodePipeline and Amazon EventBridge, OUCRU no longer needs to worry about the performance of virtual machines and the scalability of the system. This will save OUCRU hundreds of hours per year in information processing compared to using the old system. In fact, with AWS, applications have significantly improved performance and minimized serious incidents. This is crucial in enabling doctors faster access to clinical data.
Furthermore, with AWS's rich service repository, OUCRU will easily upgrade infrastructure by using additional services to meet evolving needs.
Benefits for Businesses
- Cost Savings in Operation, Maintenance of On-Premises Systems
- Savings of up to thousands of working hours for frontline clinical physicians
- 5x improvement in patient records' performance for frontline hospitals
- Quick deployment of new test environments
