Healthcare Provider Seeks Advanced Cloud Analytics Capabilities

Trianz was approached by a leading global healthcare provider that wanted to leverage cloud infrastructure to build a new secure, scalable, and industry-compliant cloud IT platform. Its internal teams would use this platform for large-scale and complex analytics in the US and EU geographic areas.

Business Challenges for the Healthcare Provider

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The healthcare client lacked any form of data analytics solution and was in need of modern and highly compliant analytics capabilities to generate healthcare insights. This new analytics solution needed to be flexible, scalable, secure, and aligned with strict guidelines and regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.

Technology Components Introduced to the Client by Trianz

Trianz identified a range of relevant technology components that would help the healthcare provider achieve its goals:

  • Amazon Elastic Map Reduce was used to rapidly apply processing and analytics to big data sources.

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service was chosen to host containerized processes and applications with autoscaling during peak and low demand.

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service was used to deploy managed Kubernetes clusters across numerous AWS availability zones.

  • AWS Glue was selected as a serverless extract-transform-load solution for data crawling, data catalogs, and data transformation workflows.

  • AWS Virtual Private Cloud was chosen instead of the public cloud due to the sensitive nature of healthcare-related to personally identifiable information (PII).

  • SageMaker is a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning algorithms.

  • AWS Lambda was introduced to enable serverless, event-driven compute workloads.

  • Amazon CloudWatch centralizes data on AWS resources, applications, and services to streamline application and infrastructure monitoring.

  • Amazon Simple Notification Service is a fully managed capacity planning, provisioning, monitoring, and patching solution.

  • Amazon Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) is a compute node service with autoscaling support.

  • Amazon Relational Database Service was used to configure and orchestrate the client’s RDMBS solution on AWS.

  • The AWS Key Management Service was added to provide robust FIPS 140-2 compliant, hardware-based security standards in the cloud.

  • AWS Simple Storage Service was chosen as an economical, scalable, and configurable data storage platform.

  • Elastic Search was introduced as a web crawling solution with RESTful support and a built-in analytics engine.

  • Amazon Cognito provides solutions to control access to AWS resources from the client software applications, including role definitions and user mapping.

  • AWS DynamoDB is a NoSQL fully managed and serverless database service based on key values, that can support high-performance applications at scale.

Trianz also helped the healthcare client to adopt HashiCorp Terraform, GitHub, Jenkins, Newrelic, Ansible, and Chef as part of the project.

The Trianz Approach to Implementing a New Cloud Infrastructure Solution

The first focus was automation, where continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines were used to deploy AWS components using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). This included GitHub for code versioning and source control, and Hashicorp Terraform as an open source IaC tool.

Next, automation rules were established for system software configuration and patch management using Chef and Ansible. This adhered to the healthcare client’s internal compliance and security controls, a critical milestone for the project.

Transformational Effects After Building a New AWS Infrastructure Environment

The healthcare client can now manage its entire cloud infrastructure system using automated IaC tools. This includes deployment to various platform environments and different geographic availability zones on AWS.

The viability of the infrastructure design was proven to attract additional stakeholder interest, with the EU area being the first successful integration attempt.

IT maintenance activities, including monitoring and stabilization, were streamlined and automated to reduce manual workloads for the IT team.

The US region is under construction and awaiting testing approval from a selection of teams trialing the architecture.

Operational automation had an immensely beneficial impact, with downtime metrics reducing by over 80%. This is thanks to the blue/green method used during application rollout on AWS.

Similarly, application spool times were significantly reduced in K8S clusters, improving latency and performance on the network.

By using managed services, security offloaded from the client to AWS. This security-as-standard helped the healthcare client to pass all internal and external auditing procedures after adoption and was critical in protecting sensitive PII.

The availability of IT services increased measurably, with fewer false alarms, reduced event noise, and automation playbooks to remediate common system anomalies.

Experience the Trianz Difference

Trianz enables digital transformations through effective strategies and excellence in execution. Collaborating with business and technology leaders, we help formulate and execute operational strategies to achieve intended business outcomes by bringing the best of consulting, technology expertise, and execution models.

Powered by knowledge, research, and experience, we enable clients to transform their business ecosystems and achieve superior performance by leveraging infrastructure, cloud, analytics, digital, and security paradigms. Reach out to get in touch or learn more.

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