CLOUD BRIDGE CASE STUDY
Healthcode's Cloud Migration Success Story
Healthcode provide leading digital solutions for the UK private healthcare market. As the UK's medical bills clearing house, they process over £3.3bn worth of medical invoices annually for hospitals and independent practitioners.
Healthcode also develop specialised IT solutions, such as practice management systems, clinical coding and secure messaging tools which streamline processes and boost efficiency for hundreds of private healthcare businesses in the UK. One such solution is The Private Practice Register, an online directory of practitioners who offer services to the private healthcare sector.
The Challenge
Healthcode were housing the infrastructure for their solutions in hosted datacentres. This complex infrastructure consisted of traditional physical and virtual servers, Active Directory, firewalls, SQL Server Databases and dedicated links between sites/offices. It also comprised of various network environments.
As the hosting contract came to an end, Healthcode decided to migrate entirely to the cloud for increased scalability, flexibility and efficiency. Due to the critical nature of this migration and ongoing services to their customers, Healthcode also required a 24x7x365 managed service.
The Solution
Healthcode approached Cloud Bridge for support and it quickly became clear that the AWS cloud platform was best suited to their needs. The project was handed over to Cloud Bridge, who got to work planning and building a solution to migrate a mix of workloads including Windows, SQL Sever into AWS.
Cloud Bridge built Shared Services and System Integration Testing (SIT) environments, which would ensure data could be moved easily to AWS and move from on premise of their Windows Applications and SQL Server would be seamless.
Cloud Bridge also wrote templates that could be reused when each environment was moved over. Both the Shared Service and SIT were built using multiple AWS services. For example, the Shared Service uses AWS Transit Gateway and Site-to-Site VPN to connect to the data-centre.
Other services such as Workspaces, CloudFormation, Secrets Manager, AWS Backup and FSX for Windows File Server were used to add resilience, security and flexibility. AWS SQL Server migration tools were also utilised to support the migration of their Databases.
After the Shared Services and SIT were created, Healthcode could easily add other environments. Each environment was deployed from the same template set quickly and consistently, allowing the customer to realise their primary goal of moving out of the hosted datacentre.
Cloud Bridge also provided Healthcode with a 24x7x365 managed service, featuring pro-active monitoring activities. This enables Healthcode to raise incidents, requests or change tickets with appropriate SLA’s depending on urgency of incidents. Cloud Bridge engineers will be on hand to provide regular status updates to the customer and troubleshoot technical incidents.
The benefits
Cloud Bridge designed, built and deployed a coherent solution that enabled Healthcode to move away from their hosted datacentre. The Windows workloads and SQL Server were moved successfully to AWS in order to be modernised at a later phase.
The added managed service ensures Healthcode have technical support whenever they need it. Healthcode now use a range of AWS services to manage, support and develop applications.
Their staff are no longer constrained by traditional and inflexible hosted hardware, and they can continue building innovative solutions that benefit the healthcare industry.
