The American Society for Microbiology is a life science society composed of more than 30,000 scientists, educators, and health professionals. ASM’s mission is to promote and advance the microbial sciences. ASM advances the microbial sciences through conferences, publications, certifications, and educational opportunities. It enhances laboratory capacity around the globe through training and resources. It provides a network for scientists in academia, industry, and clinical settings. Additionally, ASM promotes a deeper understanding of the microbial sciences to diverse audiences.
Company
- Size: 51-200 employees
- Location: USA – Washington D.C.
Industry
Practice Areas
Challenge
The American Society of Microbiology (ASM) had committed to modernizing some of the IT solutions and services. This required ASM to lift and shift various tools and applications to the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform.
In addition to shifting to the Azure Cloud, ASM needed to create a new set of applications that would streamline specific business processes for ASM staff members and vendors of ASM.
ASM runs its internal business processes on an old ERP solution. The ERP solution is leverage by ASM internal applications and applications built by their vendors via a SOAP-based Web Services API. This API needed to be modernized. Additionally, access to the API required very fine-grained security controls to limit what data an API user could access and precisely what data elements an API user could access.
Finally, ASM required the implementation of a Single Sign-On solution so that ASM’s vendor’s users could cross authenticate amongst other vendor’s sites without the need to keep logging in to each site.
Since ASM and ASM, through their vendors operate globally and primarily in the EU, all these solutions that ASM required needed to be built from the ground up with GDPR compliance baked into the software. ASM had to take great care and go to extreme lengths to know where personally identifiable data was stored, track access to that data and have the ability for the individual whose data it was to be able to delete all their personally identifiable data.
Solution
ASM’s needs required a multi-phased approach to delivering multiple software-based solutions to meet their and their vendor’s needs.
First and foremost, ASM’s solutions needed to be designed from the ground up with the Cloud in mind. All web applications, REST APIs, SQL, and NoSQL databases and storage were designed to be hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud as a SaaS application suite.
Secondly, ASM’s applications required a SAML compliant single-sign-on solution for cross-domain authentication also hosted in the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Thirdly ASM required a brand new ASP.Net/MVC-based REST API layer that needed to be designed to sit on top of their legacy API’s so that their vendors could programmatically interact with ASM’s APIs.
Results
The solution developed by Cloud 9 Infosystems has been successfully implemented and delivered the quality output with complete client satisfaction.
With Cloud 9 Infosystems multi-phased custom approach and Microsoft Azure Technologies and Services client have noticed the following key business benefits:
- ASM was able to achieve new regulation act compliance with GDPR requirements
- ASM added extra security on Data Governance and Management
- Enabled ASM to Audit and monitor logs along with security alerts
- User data is completely secured and protected globally
Together, all the above key benefits have helped the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) to keep up to date and have an edge in an industry that’s already highly competitive.