PathXL

Background

PathXL is a digital pathology company. It is one of just a handful of companies worldwide operating within this disruptive niche of the medical industry.

The company offers a software application that allows its users to manage, share and analyse high-resolution images of the glass slides used in pathology. The image resolution needs to be of the same quality an expert would expect to see when looking down a microscope, approximately 400x magnification. While other apps provide a similar service in terms of capturing images, PathXL’s specialism is in making those images easy to share within a workflow - something that was previously difficult to achieve via a standard web browser, particularly given the file sizes involved.

Ensuring simple, fast and efficient sharing of multiple files that can each be more than 1GB in size requires careful consideration of the hosting setup. That’s where Tibus was able to help.

What We Did

We provide managed hosting based on a private cloud design for PathXL’s application. This allows the strain on resources created by the use of such large image files to be shared over multiple servers, so there is no discernible drop in performance levels.

We put in place a secure hosting infrastructure in our primary Dublin data centre facility (replicated to an off-site backup server) to allow PathXL to offer a hosted service to its customers. This option allows those customers to use the application without having to worry about managing its security and performance.

And security is of paramount importance. While patient identification isn’t possible from the data being shared on PathXL’s interface, the data is often confidential and commercially sensitive, particularly for clients in the pharmaceutical sector.

Another key factor is scalability. Our private cloud setup ensures the infrastructure can grow with PathXL’s requirements. With increasing numbers of PathXL’s customers using the hosted infrastructure, and each customer potentially storing many terabytes of data, it was vital that the capacity could continue to increase accordingly.

Result

Around 60% of PathXL customers choose to use our cloud setup to host the application on their behalf rather than self-hosting it. Our ISO 27001 certification for IT governance and IT security gives PathXL and its customers reassurance that their sensitive data is hosted safely and securely.

The hosting setup is also tailored to cope with the demands of customers accessing and sharing large image files. PathXL's customers can view files and share them with commercial, educational or research partners quickly and reliably, whether that is with the laboratory next door or a colleague on the other side of the world.

PathXL’s application continues to grow and has in place a scalable hosting infrastructure that will grow with it.