Cloud4C accelerates pharma innovation at Hetero with Azure AI

July 3, 2025

Across industries, enterprises are embracing cloud transformation to improve agility, scale innovation, and respond more effectively to evolving business demands. But for organizations in essential sectors like the life sciences, the shift to the cloud isn’t just about modernization—it’s about enabling faster, more intelligent decision-making that has the potential to save lives.

Because they are highly regulated, these enterprises can benefit from special considerations when migrating to the cloud. Enter Cloud4C, an automation-driven, application-focused cloud management services provider with a focus on managing mission-critical workloads for enterprises with strict compliance needs. So far, they’ve helped 4,000 clients in 26 countries navigate their migrations with tailored, end-to-end solutions.

As an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP), Cloud4C brings deep expertise to customers looking for digital transformation at scale. Their long-standing partnership with Microsoft spans global delivery, platform integration, and joint solution development. From rightsizing infrastructure to advanced analytics and AI capabilities, Cloud4C helps enterprises unlock the benefits of cloud computing—securely, efficiently, and with measurable impact.

So, when pharmaceutical leader Hetero sought to modernize its infrastructure and embrace AI-driven automation without compromising on quality, Cloud4C and Microsoft were the natural choice to help make it happen.

Navigating the complex challenges of a tightly regulated industry

With operations in 126 countries, Hetero is one of India’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Their extensive medicinal portfolio includes anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. But like many large enterprises with legacy systems, Hetero faced challenges managing scale, efficiency, and data visibility. Business-critical functions such as root cause analysis (RCA), a process for identifying and addressing the underlying causes of quality or safety issues, relied heavily on manual work, slowing productivity and increasing the risk of regulatory gaps.

Building a modern foundation for growth and innovation on Microsoft Azure

Cloud4C partnered with a Hetero subsidiary, Audree Infotech, to gain a more complete picture of Hetero’s domain, including identifying any gaps that could be closed through the deployment of new tech. The partnership and valuable expertise of the team at Audree provided a valuable bridge between Cloud4C and Hetero, helping the teams collaborate on building a modern, flexible technology foundation.

To establish that foundation—one capable of supporting AI-driven automation, reducing operational overhead, and delivering actionable insights from data—Cloud4C developed a comprehensive solution built on Microsoft Azure. The migration resulted in a full modernization of Hetero’s core infrastructure into a secure, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud foundation.

The team began by conducting an extensive assessment, planning, and execution strategy aimed at limiting disruption to Hetero’s ongoing operations. The migration involved rightsizing SKUs to optimize cloud resources, as well as implementing geo-redundant backups, disaster recovery frameworks, and security best practices to preserve business continuity, compliance, and high system availability.

By shifting to a cloud-native architecture, Hetero dramatically reduced the need for ongoing investment in aging hardware and positioned itself to scale operations and onboard new capabilities more easily. This foundation set the stage for Hetero to address the manual inputs that were slowing down quality control and the data silos that hindered decision-making. They also realized a 40% reduction in infrastructure costs through workload rightsizing and Azure resource optimization.

Intelligent automation at scale with Microsoft AI

Using Azure AI Foundry and other AI systems offered under the Azure umbrella, the team created an AI workflow with built-in security enhancements—aligned to industry compliance requirements—that streamlined the RCA process. This made it easy to access real-time insights and predictive analytics across 11 manufacturing plants, with real-time data processing, intuitive visualization tools, and cross-platform data harmonization.

With this new data ecosystem in place, Hetero was ready to scale operations and explore new ways of researching, innovating, and compiling reports through intelligent automation and AI. They focused on high-impact, high-complexity areas of the business, including:

Root cause analysis: AI-driven analytics reduced RCA investigation time by 80%, helping Hetero take corrective action faster, maintain audit-readiness, and improve operational resilience.

Robotic process automation (RPA): Cloud4C helped Hetero deploy RPA throughout the enterprise, dramatically reducing hours needed for labor-intensive quality control procedures, including document processing and compliance checks. So far, this continuously running automation has helped Hetero automate more than 4,000 documents a month—and saves 13,500 hours of manual labor each month.

Laying the groundwork for future pharmaceutical innovations

Hetero’s partnership with Cloud4C has evolved into a long-term strategic collaboration, focused on unlocking even more value through AI-powered, cloud-based operations. Future phases of the initiative will include deeper integration of AI to support real-time insights and decision-making, expanded automation across manufacturing and supply chain processes, and continuous optimization of the cloud infrastructure to support scale and agility.

With Microsoft Azure as the backbone and Cloud4C as a dedicated transformation partner, Hetero is laying the groundwork not just for modernization but also for ongoing leadership in a complex, rapidly evolving industry. Together, they are helping shape what the future of pharma looks like: one where technology powers operational excellence, regulatory confidence, and better outcomes for patients worldwide.