Amgen accelerates biotech production connecting 64 sites in 7 months — start to finish

Amgen is one of the largest biotechnology companies in the world and has shown its dedication to helping patients with innovative approaches to a variety of health conditions.

Being on the forefront of the life sciences industry, with facilities and subsidiaries all around the world, requires that Amgen be able to rely on a robust network infrastructure. That’s vital for keeping its researchers, clinical trial program leaders, manufacturing experts and other team members and partners connected as they develop biologic medicines. Equally important is ensuring that its global network is able to effectively support new sales offices and personnel expansions at other facilities as corporate growth continues.

Amgen turned to Masergy and its hybrid network solutions to connect some 64 locations. Masergy developed a custom network that has proven instrumental in meeting the biotech firm’s need for ubiquitous delivery of networking services.

Recognized results

• Increased network agility and performance
• Accommodated corporate growth
• Enhanced customer experience
• Increased security posture
• Increased uptime and network visibility

Ready for the future

With the help of Masergy’s hybrid network solutions, Amgen can seamlessly connect global offices, data centers and remote locations with a universal high performance network that supports bandwidth on demand and quality of service control in response to changing application performance requirements.

By leveraging Masergy’s fully meshed global platform, each Amgen site is: equipped to support worldwide multicast; enabled to add Internet instances at no charge; and prepped for the addition of multiple virtual routing and forwarding (VRFs) for partner networks.

Given how fast things move in the biotech industry, there was no time to waste in moving the network project along. All circuits across regions from the U.S. to the EU to the Middle East to Australia were fully up and operational within a short time of closing the deal. Designed in a flat architecture model, a single BGP AS (Border Gateway Protocol Autonomous System) simplifies and speeds up routing changes on the Amgen network as needed. Meanwhile, doing away with Layer 3 network-to-network interfaces to reach regions such as the EU, APAC and Australia means customers enjoy seamless service and quality of service (QoS) guarantees across its global infrastructure.

Clearly, Amgen already is realizing many benefits from its transition to Masergy’s network services. But there’s more to come: Masergy is working to support IPv6 at all Amgen sites. The global roll-out is part of the plan to future-proof Amgen’s network.

The IPv6 update offers Amgen many advantages beyond expanding the pool of IP addresses, with capabilities such as:

• Simplified and speedier data transmissions because packets are handled more efficiently
• Increased security by way of IPSec and its built-in provisions for confidentiality
• Support for more robust services and new services, thanks to the restoration of true end-to-end connectivity at the IP layer

“We can offer connectivity, connect new business partners, or have new services with the flexibility and speed that our constituents require,” says Denis Zerr, VP of Enterprise IS and Technology Services at Amgen, in reference to all the benefits accruing from the company’s relationship with Masergy. “This is clearly a differentiating factor compared to the traditional service providers in this space.”

Solution highlights

• Masergy solution connects remote locations worldwide to its private IP network
• Excellent WAN visibility, network analytics
• Intelligent Connectivity provides seamless connections with a universal high performance network

Insight on tap

Masergy provides Amgen with 24×7 technical support through its Network Operations Center (NOC). Amgen’s IT staff can also make QoS changes in real time.

Of additional value is the advanced insight that Masergy’s NOC is so very good at delivering, including pro-active notification of confirmed outages within five minutes. In fact, 90 percent of NOC tickets are generated from Masergy engineers opening tickets on customers’ behalf before the customer even knows about an outage.

Amgen’s IT staff have complete visibility into their network via Masergy’s Intelligent Network Analyst, which provides advanced analytics and service control. INA, for instance, raises alarms for dropped packets and port oversubscriptions. It lets administrators track bandwidth use of critical business applications.

That comes in handy for IT administrators who need to understand current usage patterns and predict future requirements to meet changing business requirements. Says Zerr, “In the end, it’s about how we can have the most reliable and optimized network.”