HGS Digital’s cloud acceleration framework reduces implementation cost by 80%
Healthcare payer successfully completes cloud migration in 4 weeks
80%reduction in implementation costs
4 Weeks turnaround time
3,000 planned applications migratedClient background
The Fortune 500 client is one of the largest healthcare payers in the U.S.
Business challenge
In early 2019, the client was looking for an enterprise migration from an on-prem to an on-cloud setup. They had over 3,000 apps running on their data center – both customer-facing and backend. A 100-member team was organized to help migrate the applications to the cloud. With just three to four apps being migrated every month, the client was unhappy with the velocity of the migration.
Another challenge faced by the client was that there was no way for the leadership team to control how the workload owners were spending and provisioning. Cloud providers usually generate a single invoice, making it challenging for leaders to identify and allocate resource costs. Without this transparency, infrastructure spending was spiraling beyond budgets.
For operations teams, one the biggest challenges was compliance. Different teams had different baseline requirements, which had to be manually verified following industry-defined regulatory policies when dealing with Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Given the sensitivity of this type of data, security and accuracy was a big priority.
In sum, the client needed to simplify the migration process, collate and automate best practices and policies, and facilitate spending governance and reconciliation.
The solution
HGS Cloud Accelerator, a framework that combines tools, best practices, security and governance, and automation, was recommended to the client to accelerate their cloud migration.
The HGS Digital team aligned with the client to define and establish best practices, requirements, and security guardrails that could be leveraged across the enterprise, with the aim of reducing churn and rework.
The secure and operationally-efficient cloud ecosystem was enabled in the following ways:
Budgeting
With the cloud accelerator, parameters of spending could be defined, so that it would prevent overspending past the threshold amount approved initially. The customized framework provided both the large volume billing benefit, as well as an easy way to generate independent invoices pointing towards individual cost centers.
In addition, customized tagging options were deployed to provide a simple and automated way of generating independent invoicing for internal chargebacks. Each team defined their unique tagging requirements, and automation tools helped enforce them during asset creation.
Data security
It was imperative to automate sensitive healthcare information so that there were zero errors in data transfer. With the cloud accelerator, the information transfer was automated, thereby removing the possibility of human error in data management.
Hiring and training
The team involved in this project possessed specific cloud experience, as well as exceptional engineering skills, which was instrumental in understanding the client challenges and building a customized platform that could address them. The platform solution was self-reliant and training was provided to the client teams, which reduced their long term need for support.
Governance, compliance, and best practices
Compliance and governance were automated and built into the platform. In this way, when any non-compliant resource was created, all the stakeholders could be instantly notified and necessary actions could be taken to rectify the resource. Similar to tagging, each team could enforce their own custom requirements via automation using services, policies and boundary policies. Sentinel policies could then detect and prevent non-compliant actions during resource creation time.
The platform eliminated the sequential need for workloads to be queued up, removed the bottlenecks of resource constraints across the various approval channels, and enabled the ability of migration of 3,000 applications. Multiple apps could be on-boarded on the same day, seamlessly and simultaneously, with the support teams brought in only for issues and resolutions.
Results
The cloud accelerator platform has enabled an 80%+ reduction in the cost of implementation, when compared to the cost of building a similar solution in-house from scratch.
Here are a few ways the cloud accelerator helped in accelerating the migration to cloud:
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