40 CASE STUDY AW AUGUST 2022
How Johnson & Johnson’s Secure Data Pipeline Helped Speed the COVID-19 Vaccine Production Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform and Cirrus Link’s MQTT modules are the heart of the secure data pipeline built for Johnson & Johnson by system integrator Automated Control Concepts. By Jeanne Schweder, contributing writer
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s the world marshalled its resources in 2020 to fight the COVID-19 virus pandemic, major pharmaceutical companies were among those on the front lines, racing to develop, test and produce vaccines that could help protect billions of people. Technology played a key role in that effort, not only in creating new vaccines in record time but in ensuring they would be of the highest quality. Johnson & Johnson challenged its pharmaceutical arm, Janssen, with producing one billion doses of its vaccine. To reach that goal, Janssen turned to a contract manufacturer that specialized in rapid manufacturing of vaccines and other treatments in large quantities during public health emergencies. Janssen required access to near real-time data to monitor key production and quality metrics so that it could assure the success of each batch. This was difficult to achieve since the contract manufacturer’s operations technology (OT) infrastructure, including control systems and data collection,
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is isolated from both internal and outside networks, particularly networks with internet access. The manufacturer tasked independent system integrator Automated Control Concepts (ACC), which is headquartered in Neptune, N.J., with creating a secure data pipeline that could provide this critical information to Janssen. A secure and scalable architecture was required to meet Janssen’s information needs, starting with an Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) Hub that Janssen provided to receive the production and batch data from the contract manufacturer’s system. ACC then recommended using Inductive Automation’s Ignition software platform with Cirrus Link’s MQTT modules as the heart of this secure data pipeline. Ignition provided a robust development environment and support for MQTT messaging, which was ideal for this application because it is designed to be used for secure, realtime, mission-critical data. Using MQTT, ACC was able to establish a se-
cure gateway that ensured only Janssen’s data was transmitted. This architecture proved to operate reliably in an external, unfamiliar environment while preserving data quality. It also supported the manufacturer’s ability to make the vaccine with fewer operators, which was particularly important with the social distancing requirements around COVID-19. The Cirrus Link MQTT transmitter, distributor and engine, plus the Azure Injector, formed the heart of the system, all running on Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform. MQTT is a publish/subscribe messaging protocol originally developed more than 20 years ago to address the need for lightweight communications over low-bandwidth networks. MQTT architectures need three components: MQTT transmitters—the clients that produce the data—usually directly connected to the control or SCADA system; the MQTT engine, the clients that consume the data; and the MQTT servers, which distribute the data from the transmitters to the engine.
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