Reinventing myDNA Business with Data Analytics

About myDNA

myDNA is a health tech company bringing technology to healthcare with a mission to improve health worldwide. They developed a personalised wellness myDNA test that lets you discover how your body is likely to respond to food, exercise, sleep, vitamins, medications, and more, according to your genome.

It is a life changer for those who want to skip the lengthy trial and error process, and achieve their desired fitness goals sooner. Moreover, myDna is a reliable way of assisting practitioners in selecting safe and effective medications for their patients based on their unique genetic makeup. For example, doctors can prescribe antidepressants, and post-surgery pain killers that are more likely to be successful in the first instance.

The most exciting part is that this technology, which has historically been so expensive, is now available at an affordable price for normal people like you and me! Not to mention, finding out you have relatives on the other side of the world through a family matching DNA test is pretty cool!

Providing life health services based on accurate data

After replatforming myDNA IT systems from a distributed monolithic database to a microservice architecture, the team needed assistance in delivering automated tools and meaningful insights through the business. This would give them an understanding of potential areas and markets to expand their services, the agility to move and change fast as a business and, provide an advantage over competitors by delivering the services, products, and customer experience their customers seek. This is all based on data rather than assumptions.

myDNA was seeking a cloud consultant that could assist them in exploring and understanding events by expanding their data and analytics capabilities. In addition, the business planned to increase their data skills so their in-house IT team would be able to maintain and continue building the new applications in a safe and effective environment.

AWS performed a Data Lab with myDNA stakeholders where they co-designed a technical architecture and built a Pilot to start the journey. This gave the myDNA team an understanding of all the AWS cloud data and analytics solutions available. However, they required a personalised and well-designed technology roadmap taking their IT skills and myDNA business goals into consideration, as opposed to a ‘one solution fits all’ strategy. This is exactly what DNX Solutions delivered!

How did DNX Solutions help myDNA establish a modern security data strategy in just one month?

The project started with DNX’s effective and interactive discovery where our team identified the company’s needs, had a complete picture of the existing company data, the architecture used, potential technological and/or team challenges. With that, our team created a clear road map where outcomes were evident even before the conclusion of the project

In the initial phase, DNX built the MVP using AWS Console, more general roles, data sources, and built simple reports and dashboards to present basic metrics.
After that, our data cloud experts built a more robust solution fit for production, with a focus on resilience, performance, reliability, security and cost optimisation using Devops methodology, CI/CD pipelines, automation and serverless architecture whenever possible.

Once the core platform was established, we brought more data sources, integrating them into the solution, and helped to build more complex and advanced solutions such as Machine Learning.

AWS Services Used

S3 Datalakes
Raw: hosts the data extracted allowing governance, auditability, durability and security controls

DynamoDB / SSM
Stores configuration tables, parameters, and secrets used by the pipeline and ETL Jobs to automate the data process

Crawlers
Crawlers can scan the files in the datalake or databases, infer the schema and add the tables on the data catalogues

Glue ETL
Serverless Spark solution for high performance ETL jobs within AWS

Data Catalogues
Stores the metadata and metrics regarding Databases, Connections, Jobs, partitions, etc. It can grant/deny access up to the table level

Quicksight
Can consume data from multiple sources within AWS and allow user-friendly development of reports, analytics and dashboards integrated with AWS platform

Lake Formation
Low code solution to govern and administer the Data Lake. An additional layer of security including row/column level controls

Lambdas
Wild cards that can help tie the solution together in a variety of roles and use cases

Athena
Athena can query data stored in S3 using simple SQL. It allows access segregation to metadata and history via workgroups, which can be compounded with IAM roles

myDNA to provide real insights at the click of a button

There is no doubt that DNX Solutions delivered value to myDNA. The team reported they were able to deliver another data transformation that depended directly on the result of DNX’s work.

Before engagement with DNX, the myDNA team could take three to five days to deliver a few manual reports in response to business queries. The company now is able to deliver different reports based on live data with just a click of a button. Not only does the business have accurate insightful data to make their decision of what, when, and where they should invest, but they also have the agility to make these decisions.

The myDNA team can now focus on what they do best rather than spending days merging unreliable information from various sources to produce a handful of outdated reports.

The next step for myDNA is to adopt AWS machine learning to unveil predictions, achieving far better real-world results.