Several years ago, Flatiron Health cofounders Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg watched helplessly as some of their family members and friends battled cancer. Although they were inspired by their courage in fighting the disease, they were also frustrated. “We realized there was no easy solution to ensure that researchers and doctors were collaborating by learning from every patient’s experience with cancer,” says Weinberg. “A lot of the data was siloed and difficult to access.”

Motivated to make a difference, Weinberg and Turner founded Flatiron Health in New York City in 2012. The company offers a software platform that seeks to connect cancer centers across the United States so they can share what they have learned. “Our tagline is: ‘Fighting cancer with organized data.’ We want to organize real-world cancer data and derive the right insights from these data sets to inform cancer research,” says Dan Eisenberg, the company’s senior staff software engineering manager.

Flatiron works with more than 265 oncology practices, three large academic research institutions, and other healthcare organizations, which use the company’s software to manage their daily workflows in one central system. The cloud-based system currently analyzes more than 1.6 million cancer patients.

As the company grew, however, it kept running into limitations on its legacy cloud platform. Due to a lack of good automation tools and APIs, Flatiron software developers couldn’t innovate as quickly as they needed to. “As a startup, we want to get our solutions to market as fast as possible, and we also want to update our existing solutions quickly,” Eisenberg says. For instance, getting software to market faster is important for the Flatiron research division, which works with pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies. “The average time to get a new drug to market is 10 years,” says Eisenberg. “If we can more quickly enable researchers to make smarter decisions with good data, they could potentially bring drugs to market faster.”

Flatiron began exploring new cloud technologies to meet its needs, with security and compliance as the primary criteria. “Our applications collect and store a lot of sensitive patient information, and that’s our number one priority—ensuring we’re in compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations,” Eisenberg says.