BC Cancer provides a comprehensive cancer control program for the people of BC in partnership with regional health authorities.

How We Helped BC Cancer Lab use Azure Cloud in the Fight Against Cancer

Headquarters: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Number of Employees: 1,600 Employees

THE CHALLENGE

Huge Data Volume Containing Vital Research

BC Cancer focuses on single-cell genome sequencing to develop targeted cancer treatments. Thus, its methodology created a lot of data, and it needed more storage and scalability than its on-premises environment provided.

BC Cancer needed a digital solution that would allow them to:

Build a data management infrastructure for over 10,000 patients — cases diagnosed in Canada
Develop a secure cloud infrastructure for a critical public health organization in Canada and worldwide
Modernize cloud systems to become scalable for future growth

THE SOLUTION

Cloud Migration and Increased Collaboration

Our Approach

The institute deployed Microsoft Azure, and runs its own machine learning models using Azure Virtual Machines and the scalable cloud platform.
It began the Azure cloud migration of the majority of its 1 petabyte genome database with support from Invero.
Azure Batch was leveraged to schedule the jobs required to process tens of thousands of files every 72 hours

Technology Used

Microsoft Azure
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Batch
Azure Virtual Machine

THE RESULTS

Secure for the Future

Increased Capacity and Decreased Costs

The BC Cancer lab now processes the high volume of data it needs, generating a terabyte (TB) of data a week and 400–500 TB of data a year. Previously, they would need to buy new hard drives and server racks regularly, but with Azure they have limitless computational power and decreased costs.

Scalability and Speed

The improvements in data management and analysis will help inform cancer diagnoses and treatments as research eventually moves into clinical applicability. Previously, they would get held up on processes for a year but now they can resolve tasks in less than a month.

Increased Security

BC Cancer works with highly sensitive data, and the lab needed to perform a locally mandated privacy and ethics review to comply with BC Privacy Commission rules. The lab is able to fully trust in the password-protected environment of the Azure platform.

Daniel Lai

Senior Bioinformatics Scientist

We had millions of dollars of on-premises servers that we purchased through grant funding. They powered our research for almost a decade, but they had limited lifespans and capabilities. We needed to move to the cloud to continue supporting research at the scale we need.