Chimerix, a start-up pharmaceutical company, had a legacy static web site that provided basic background about the company. With several drugs in the pipeline, Chimerix wanted to upgrade and scale their web presence to showcase these products. A digital marketing agency was brought in to develop the branding and AccessECM was contracted to architect, build and deploy the site, as well as provide 24/7 support and maintenance.
Starting with essentially a clean slate, AccessECM architects devoted a significant amount of time analyzing web properties from other companies in similar and later stage growth curves. In order to provide a balance between scalability and cost the an offering in the Microsoft Azure cloud was recommended and ultimately deployed.
Performance testing was conducted to identify optimal performance parameters including caching and localized content delivery. To comply with corporate governance role based security with testing and staging environments were deployed. Finally, back-up, recovery and alerting procedures were developed and implemented.
At the conclusion of the project, Chimerix took delivery of a highly scalable and reliable platform that is also cost affective. Leveraging the capabilities in the Azure cloud delivered very impressive result. Here is a partial breakdown of what was accomplished:
- Load testing demonstrated that the web site could handle thousands of simultaneous connections and respond in less than 1 sec
- Service auto-scales driven by the demand based on the resources consumption
- AccessECM support team alerted under any system warning of failures
- 24/7 monitoring and alerting for any malicious activities
- Daily backups of Azure service and web content management system
- All upgrades are managed under best practices
- Architecture covered under Microsoft SLA
