Cognidox: Business Boomed After Seamless Migration

Cognidox is transforming document management for medical device, life sciences, and semiconductor companies. The company is a Lean electronic quality management system (eQMS) that provides a flexible, digital framework for ISO 9001, ISO 13485, and FDA 21 CFR Part 820 compliance. Customers include industry giants such as Samsung, Siemens, AMD, and Novartis.

When its longtime cloud provider suddenly announced it was shutting down, Cognidox had to find a new partner — and fast. It turned to Akamai for a seamless, secure migration.

When ElasticHosts announced its impending closure in 2020 with just 60 days’ notice, Cognidox was caught off guard. Cognidox had been a customer since 2012, so the company found itself facing a make-or-break moment.

As Joe Byrne, the company’s CEO, explained, “We had to migrate our entire platform and make it seamless for our users. Our customers’ IP is in our hands, and we needed a reliable partner immediately.”

With no time to waste, Cognidox hired a firm to research cloud provider options. Within two weeks, Cognidox had a hosting assessment report covering seven providers, one of which was Linode (acquired by Akamai in 2022).

Byrne and Vittal Aithal, Cognidox CTO and co-founder, narrowed their options to four: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Akamai. After assessing these vendors' capabilities, capacity, and quality, Cognidox chose Akamai as its primary public cloud provider and AWS for offsite backups.

As the migration started, Cognidox was confident in its decision. “I’ve chosen many partners, and Akamai was a breath of fresh air. It exceeded our expectations during a very stressful time,” explained Byrne.

The reliability and performance of the Akamai platform further reduced stress. As Aithal said, when running a fleet of hundreds of machines, you don’t want to worry about any of them going down. “We can trust Akamai,” he underscored.

Aithal also emphasized the importance of vendor responsiveness. “With other big vendors, we’d just be another number. Ever since Akamai acquired Linode, we enjoy personal, responsive support.” Byrne added: “The quality of support staff during migration and since has been brilliant.”

As Byrne told it, the migration proved the perfect time for Cognidox to automate previously manual processes. “Now we can provision new customers in just an hour. Akamai was the infrastructure partner we needed to thrive.”

Cognidox uses dedicated compute instances for its customers and shared instances for proofs of concept and block storage volumes. “Our customers won’t take a performance hit from other customers’ workloads. At the same time, we control costs by spinning up shared instances for prospects,” said Aithal.

The company can also assure customers that their data is secure in Akamai’s certified data centers. “Akamai even helped with data encryption, which was a real time-saver and compliance enabler,” he continued.

With Akamai, Cognidox not only automated its processes but also improved margins, and it has grown 40% yearly since 2021. And the company is ready to scale even further.

With much of the world still relying on paper-based quality management — or processes on shared drives — Cognidox provides the digital infrastructure companies need to improve operations. “Akamai is a rock-solid partner in our growth. Even if we double in size, Akamai’s platform has us covered,” concluded Byrne.

Cognidox is a leading and cost-effective provider of electronic quality management solutions (eQMS) to the life science markets. Built on 15 years of electronic document management solution (eDMS) core functionality, Cognidox provides world-class documentation traceability, design control, technical files submission, and a host of quality modules covering everything from CAPA to risk management. Cognidox boasts powerful integrations to MS Office and Docusign, as well as a Visio-driven graphical front end to flowchart internal procedures and processes for the complete life sciences eQMS. To find out more, visit cognidox.com.