Client
In healthcare today, the focus is on effectively using data to enhance patient outcomes. Our client, an American healthcare information technology company leads this transformation by integrating technology and expertise. By collaborating with tech firms, they boost patient engagement and use AI to accelerate new age research.
Challenges
The Fortune 500 healthcare company encountered significant challenges with its on-premises data infrastructure, for which it strategized a VMWare to AWS Migration. Its issues were scalability, maintenance, and cost-efficiency. The company faced challenges with outdated hardware, rising VMware licensing costs, and the complexity of managing multiple virtualization platforms.
They were looking for a rapid VMware exit, but the risks involved in migrating high compliance healthcare data left them in the dark. Additionally, their critical AI model, designed to predict patient risk, required dynamic server scaling, but obsolete hardware hindered their ability to meet its AI’s virtualization requirements.
Additionally, the company is experiencing subpar application performance, especially in specific geographic regions during peak usage times, which is attributed to latency issues. This problem not only affects technical operations but also hampers the delivery of timely, crucial insights to healthcare professionals.
Additionally, latency impacted application performance in specific regions during peak times. To address these challenges, the company partnered with Hexaware for efficient data infrastructure with the VMware to AWS migration, ensuring their AI models uphold the needs for evolved patient care.
Solution
A Journey to the Cloud: The Shift from On Premises
The healthcare innovator’s critical applications, essential for managing customer journeys, were stuck in an outdated on-premises setup. Rising VMware license costs was one of the significant contributors towards IT cost and pivotal nudge for the migration.
To tackle these challenges, we initiated a strategy to put in action our client’s long-term vision for a seamless global digital healthcare ecosystem.
We built a unified landing zone platform for migration to AWS for a solid foundation for enterprise AI, and other compute-based services, ensuring comprehensive delivery and high availability of data for training AI models, driving powerful insights, and new business outcomes.
To solve their challenges, we elevated their applications ecosystem with 7 steps migration approach in journey to cloud:
Step 1: Discovery—Mapping Out IT Environment
With speed in mind, we quickly set out to understand the client’s current IT infrastructure. We took inventory of their virtual machines, applications, and databases running on VMware. Engaging with key stakeholders helped us identify critical dependencies and business requirements. This phase focused on understanding the existing infrastructure, pinpointing areas for End of Service Life (EOSL) upgrades, and consolidating licenses to streamline operations and cut costs.
Step 2: Assessment—Evaluating Enterprise Readiness
The assessment phase was crucial in determining the client’s readiness for a swift migration. We thoroughly analyzed workloads to evaluate their compatibility with AWS services. This involved assessing potential risks and conducting a rapid cost analysis to ensure the migration would deliver the expected financial benefits. Our focus was on consolidating licenses and reducing costs, ensuring that the transition to the cloud would be financially beneficial while maintaining operational integrity.
Step 3: Migration Strategy—Agile Factory Migration
To ensure a rapid transition, we adopted an agile factory migration approach. This involved setting up dedicated teams to handle different aspects of the migration process, allowing for parallel execution of tasks and ensuring a streamlined workflow. An agile methodology enabled us to quickly adapt to any challenges, maintaining momentum throughout the migration process. This approach ensured that the migration was not only efficient but also flexible, accommodating the unique needs of each application and workload.
Step 4: Cloud Right-sizing—Target Size Recommendations
Determining the optimal size and configuration for AWS resources was critical to achieving a balance between operational efficiency and financial prudence. Using AWS Migration Hub tools like AWS Application Migration Service and AWS Database Migration Service, we ensured resources were correctly sized for performance and cost-effectiveness. This involved analyzing usage patterns and performance metrics to configure resources without over-provisioning in any way.
Step 5: Recommendations—Target Architecture Design
Designing the target architecture on AWS was a collaborative effort, focusing on scalability, resilience, and compliance for healthcare. We used AWS’s suite of services, including EC2 and RDS, to create architecture that met the client’s performance needs while ensuring quick deployment. This included enhancements for disaster recovery and business continuity, ensuring robust data protection and recovery capabilities.
Step 6: Migration Treatment—Addressing Applications’ Needs
Each application was assigned a specific migration treatment, primarily focusing on rehosting to facilitate a rapid transition. This approach allowed for immediate cost savings and minimal changes to the existing applications, ensuring a quick and efficient migration process. By tailoring the migration treatment to each application’s unique requirements, we ensured a seamless transition and minimized disruptions to operations.
Step 7: Migration at Scale—Wave Groups Strategy
We organized the migration into wave groups to manage the process at scale. Each wave group consisted of a set of applications and workloads that were migrated together. This strategy enabled efficient resource allocation and minimized downtime, ensuring that critical applications were prioritized.
By phasing the migration, we ensured a smooth transition, with each wave building on the success of the previous one, ultimately leading to a comprehensive migration of all applications and workloads. We have a framework for migration that includes a set of controls and processes based on previous migrations.
Benefits
At Hexaware, our consultative and strategic approach to cloud transformation empowered the enterprise with innovative healthcare solutions for AI readiness, next gen customer satisfaction, and a new outlook on innovation.
Understanding their challenges enabled us to craft a tailored roadmap integrated with their strategic vision. From strengthening risk management to expediting time-to-market for innovative services, our client benefits from tangible business outcomes.
Migrating to AWS provided our client with numerous advantages, aligning perfectly with their vision of becoming a leader in innovative solutions:
FinOps and resource optimization: By transitioning away from costly VMware licenses, the client significantly reduced operational expenses, redirecting funds to app innovation.
Increased scalability: AWS’s flexible infrastructure allowed the client to scale resources dynamically, ensuring they could efficiently handle varying workloads, while scaling easily.
Improved disaster recovery and business continuity: With AWS’s robust disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, the client achieved enhanced data protection and recovery capabilities. This ensured minimal disruption in the event of an outage.
Streamlined enterprise operations: The migration eliminated silos, allowing applications to operate in a more integrated and cohesive manner. This streamlined operations and improved the flow of information across the enterprise, powering innovation.
Future-ready secure AWS architecture: The target architecture on AWS was designed for scalability, resilience, compliance and security. This provided a rock steady foundation for future growth, positioning them for long-term success with innovation.
These benefits collectively empowered the client to drive legacy system transformation, setting the stage for the future where applications run the show.
Summary
As data proliferation becomes a must, success in innovation requires strategic transformation of AI, cloud, data, and app ecosystems for future challenges.
Our focus was on fortifying readiness for the distributed cloud paradigm. As a trusted partner, we established a foundation that addresses immediate priorities while anticipating future growth. Powered with AWS services and a rapid VMware exit, we created a new foundation for relentless innovation.
