BioMérieux: Modernizing Legacy Systems for a Global Healthcare Leader

Cloud for Healthcare

Each day we are faced with the changing needs of technology, data storage, and privacy. The healthcare and life science (HC and Life Sci.) industries are especially susceptible to risks due to the sensitivity and security of personal data of their patients, research, and diagnostics. And while healthcare organizations have made strides to strengthen their environments, there are still gaps and growing challenges. We’ll point out the pain points that continue to be roadblocks for the HC and Life Sci. vertical, specifically the adoption of cloud storage, and illustrate how the SoftNAS solutions helped. 

E&P’s Most Pressing Storage Issues

It’s not surprising the top areas of challenge for the HC and Life Sci sector are: 

• Data Management: Handling vast amounts of data, ensuring it can be shared between systems (interoperability), and managing costs can be significant hurdles. 
• Operational Concerns: Maintaining reliable access, adapting workflows, and training staff on new cloud systems are essential for effortless operations. 
• Security and Compliance: Protecting highly sensitive patient data (like that covered by HIPAA) is paramount. Cloud storage for healthcare and life sciences must meet strict regulatory requirements. 

Data Silos, Standardization and Reliability in Cloud for Healthcare

In the past, healthcare organizations relied on legacy systems, which quickly became outdated, had security concerns, and were costly to support. 

Companies, such as BioMérieux, a global biotechnology organization, understood the benefits of cloud storage for their business. BioMérieux pioneers diagnostics for a multitude of tests requiring extreme sensitivity and secure data. Their advanced studies not only cover food safety through predictive diagnostics and prevention, but they also develop treatment options to overcome challenges to diagnose diseases and infections and other critical life science technologies.  

Since their organization serves over 160 countries across their network, bioMérieux had the challenge of not only migrating data, but also integrating data from their old technology systems to the cloud. They also needed to ensure the healthcare data wasn’t fragmented and were able to have a standardization for the data to be shared between the subsidiaries they served. 

For a leader like BioMérieux, maintaining smooth, uninterrupted operations is critical—especially when transitioning to cloud-based storage. SoftNAS helped mitigate operational concerns by ensuring high availability and reliable data access, even across distributed teams and regions. As part of the deployment plan, bioMérieux benefitted from several enhancements, such as:   

• An unified storage layer between cloud platforms to enable a streamlined and simplified management of their refreshed environment.  
• A centralized management console for easy configuration and monitoring across their SoftNAS instance.  
• Offering a one-click upgrade process to provide a non-disruptive experience and minimize downtime. 

In addition, breaking down the data silos and achieving compatibility is essential for effective data sharing and analysis.  BioMérieux was also able to take advantage of the multiple file protocols SoftNAS supports to allow different applications and systems to share data without custom integrations.  

Transforming Data Challenges to Solutions

Leveraging a cloud solution, like SoftNAS can help oil and gas operations address these challenges more efficiently. The use cases below are a few ways SoftNAS helped a global E&P provider in the industry with their tailored needs.

• Flexible Deployment: Our cloud solution supports hybrid environments, meaning an organization can have a mixed infrastructure with on-prem hardware or cloud services. No matter the computing environment, SoftNAS provides seamless data access in remote upstream field locations and centralized facilities – an essential capability for the oil and gas industry’s distributed operations.
• Data Protection and Compliance Management: Features like edge-to-core replication, snapshot replication, failover clustering, and encryption ensure data integrity, availability, and security. Edge-to-Core replication is also used to synchronize data from remote edge locations (e.g., drilling sites to centralized clients (e.g. data centers or cloud storage). SoftNAS organizes, secures, and retrieves compliance-related data efficiently, ensuring global energy providers meet strict regulatory audits and reporting requirements with ease.
• Low Latency: Supporting predictive maintenance systems to provide faster insights, enable real-time storage, and processing of IoT sensor data from drilling rigs, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure with minimal delays requires low-latency data operations.
• Compression and Deduplication: SoftNAS leverages data reduction techniques to significantly decrease the amount of storage space needed. By identifying and eliminating redundant data, storage can be optimized for a reduced data footprint across the cloud.
• Data Synchronization Across Global Operations: SoftNAS facilitates data replication and synchronization across the provider’s global sites, ensuring every team has consistent, up-to-date information: a vital feature for cross-site collaboration on exploration projects.
• Support for Edge Computing: Edge computing is enabled as part of the SoftNAS solution, by providing local storage at remote sites, ensuring critical data is processed and stored locally without reliance on continuous cloud connectivity. This reduces latency, enhances performance, and ensures resilience even in disconnected environments.
• Ease of Integration: Works with industry-standard analytics and monitoring tools, simplifying storage management and improving operational efficiency.

Security and Compliance in Cloud for Healthcare

BioMérieux needs to ensure their organization has the frameworks in place to be following their data and volumes of directories. Securing diagnostic information, clinician studies, patient data, and other sensitive files is a top priority for regulations, such as: 

• HIPAA Privacy Rule (for handling protected health information)  
• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation for data collection in the EU) 
• ISO 27001 (general information security management) 

SoftNAS supports the compliance frameworks so bioMérieux can build out the architecture within their networks to adhere to the varying regulations and privacy across the globe. To further aid bioMérieux in their security and compliance guidelines, SoftNAS supports encryption for data at rest and in-transit (for SMB) or active data. As a multi-regional organization, snapshots, activity logs and data audits for traceability and disaster recovery for any geo-replication can also be supported by SoftNAS for data residency requirements. 

Whether labs are in Europe, Asia, or the Americas, SoftNAS provides a consistent, fast, and secure experience, keeping daily operations seamless. 

As healthcare and life science organizations like BioMérieux continue to evolve, the shift to cloud storage is not just a technology upgrade—it is a strategic move to future-proof operations, protect patient information, and accelerate medical innovation. SoftNAS plays a vital role by addressing key challenges like data management, operational continuity, and regulatory compliance. By leveraging SoftNAS, bioMérieux was able to abstract storage management from their compute instance, offloading the heavy lifting to scalable cloud storage. SoftNAS provides the tools needed to replace legacy systems, maintain reliability across global teams, and protect sensitive data with enterprise-grade security. 

For the HC and Life Sci. industries, the ability to securely access, manage, and share data across borders and systems is more than a convenience—it’s a necessity. With SoftNAS, organizations gain a trusted partner in cloud storage, helping them break down silos, standardize workflows, and support the critical work they do every day. Ultimately, improving healthcare analytics and patient management. 

Start your cloud for healthcare transformation with confidence. See How SoftNAS can empower Healthcare and Life Science leaders like BioMérieux – Schedule a Demo Today!