Astellas Pharma closes 6 datacenters worldwide by moving to Azure

Astellas Pharma, a Japanese multinational pharmaceutical company, has always been driven by one goal: delivering the greatest benefit to patients worldwide. Whether through drugs, digital tools, or services, the company prioritizes innovation to improve outcomes.

That mission has stayed consistent even as technology has completely transformed the pharmaceutical industry over the years, says Paul Batulis, the lead for hybrid cloud delivery and operations at Astellas Pharma. As a 25-year veteran of the field, he would know. Batulis recalls the days when seeking FDA approval for a new drug meant that an 18-wheeler showed up at a company’s headquarters to be filled with paperwork that was transported to the FDA. Now, of course, that’s all done online. The industry has changed dramatically – and Astellas has changed with it.

For its part, Astellas Pharma is continuously looking for ways to embrace the latest tech developments to enhance efficiency and productivity. So, like many companies across industries, Astellas Pharma considered whether it made sense to exit its physical datacenters, shifting operations to the cloud to unlock new agility – and the company turned to Azure to make it happen. Astellas Pharma ultimately closed six datacenters worldwide, realizing significant cost savings by getting out of its on-premises datacenters. 

Because the majority of the company’s workloads are Windows-based, Astellas was able to utilize a lift and shift migration using native Azure migration tools for the majority of the 250 servers it migrated. There were, however, a few more difficult aspects, which Batulis refers to as “big rocks.” One such rock was a massive file share that took up 500 terabytes of local disk. For this, Astellas utilized Azure Data Box, a physical device that enables the transfer of large amounts of data to Azure.

“We had it [the Azure Data Box] delivered to our on-prem datacenter, worked with the team and got the data up there,” Batulis said. “We would not have hit our timeline without it.”

That timeline was a mere six months, an extremely aggressive target because of the potential for significant cost savings; Batulis says the total migration probably should have taken two years. The migration covered core enterprise workloads and critical databases, requiring extreme coordination across teams and a high degree of trust in Azure’s performance and resilience.

That expedited migration was only possible thanks to what Astellas Pharma has internally called a “Triple A Partnership” among Astellas, Azure and Microsoft partner Accenture. Batulis and U both emphasize that the aggressive timeline would not have been possible without the Accenture team. Accenture and Microsoft provided tailored recommendations and helped coordinate the database migration to align with the migration of application servers. The two companies delivered custom guidance across every layer – from database to app infrastructure – ensuring speed didn’t come at the expense of precision. This three-way collaboration ensured that the move was not only fast but strategically aligned for long-term optimization and innovation.  

Another boon to the project was the announcement that Oracle Database@Azure would be released in the East Japan region. This created the opportunity to consolidate Oracle databases, another “big rock,” and application workloads in a single, optimized platform. Locating both database and application infrastructure in the same cloud environment would help the company realize huge benefits, especially around latency. 

“By migrating to Azure, it’s been fairly seamless for the business,” Batulis says. “It’s no different than when the application tier sat in the same datacenter as the Exadata.”

No different in terms of performance, but with many opportunities to make improvements that can benefit the company’s bottom line. 

Astellas has now finished migrating about 300 servers, and Batulis expects they will be able to reduce that number by about half once they have optimized to eliminate redundancies and shift to cloud-native for many of their applications. The shift to Azure has given Astellas the flexibility to right-size its infrastructure in real time – no longer limited by the fixed capacity of on-premises systems. 

"We get all the benefits of using cloud solutions compared to on-premises infrastructure,” says Keisen U, Senior Associate, Digital X, Foundation X. “Fast performance, scalability, and integration with other Azure services – that’s what the cloud gives us,” says Keisen U.

Security has also seen a major upgrade: With Azure’s automated patching and policy-based controls, Astellas can enforce consistent standards across all subscriptions without coordinating downtime across departments. Batulis adds that a move to Azure also offers extended support for their older operating systems.

The company also uses Azure Blob Storage and is eyeing additional ways to take advantage of Azure OpenAI, which it’s currently using primarily for corporate workloads. With the foundation of a modern cloud environment, Astellas is exploring how Azure AI can support R&D, accelerate insights and improve outcomes for patients globally.

The completed migration has also created a clear path for the company’s ongoing cloud transformation. 

“We have these satellite offices all over the world and this has given us our road map for how we can get rid of the rest of the systems that are still on prem scattered throughout the world,” Batulis said. “The architecture that we built here with the partnership of Accenture and Microsoft is going to allow us to move forward in that journey.” From reducing costs and complexity to enabling smarter innovation, Astella’s cloud-first strategy is laying the groundwork for the next era of patient-centered discovery.

Discover more about Astellas Pharma on LinkedIn and YouTube.