Healthcare Case Study – Migration to Azure Cloud

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Customer Background  

The customer is a renowned healthcare technology company in North America. Over the years, the company  has provided software solutions to a lineup of hospitals, clinics, research centers and other medical  institutions.  

Business Requirement 

As the business underwent significant expansion, the customer wanted to reduce the maintenance hassle and  focus on core processes. They approached Apple Consulting Group (ACG) for a secure migration of their legacy  system data to Azure cloud.  

Roadmap 

In compliance with the Azure Lift & Shift Migration process, the business system were thoroughly studies  before architecting the landscape in the new environment. Following is a broader layout of the phased  approach at pursuing the migration in a secure and seamless manner.  

Strategy & Planning  

This is the actual phase of requirement gathering and scoping the solution. Given the unpredictable peak load  in the legacy system, the Azure SQL Elastic Pools were used to absorb the varying load. These pools worked  perfectly for the customer system as they are crafted for 5 databases. 

 Migrate  

Lift & Shift was handpicked as the migration strategy for the project as it performs quick migration of objects in  the new system. Diligently following the Azure migration guide, the ACG team used Azure Site Recovery (ASR 3)  to test the system’s sturdiness in an event of failure.  

Monitor  

As the new subscription for Azure is provisioned, relevant user roles are created. Furthermore, end-to-end  operation management of cloud operations are governed with hyper care.  

Implementation  

A provisioned database was pre-allocated a fixed amount of compute resources, including CPU and memory.  Going forward, the following pre-requisites from the customer were required.  

  1. Owner access on Azure Subscription  
  2. Setting up the Configuration server  
  3. S2S VPN connectivity between Azure & VMware infrastructure  

The deployment activity was divided into 3 phases – 

Phase 1 – VM Replication  

The Recovery Service Vault (RSV) from Azure is configured followed by registering the configuration server.  Using Azure Site Recovery, 9 VMs were successfully migrated without any downtimes. The customer took over  the control to perform VHD files upload before deployment.  

Phase 2 – Test Failover 

After the VHD files were successfully uploaded by the customer’s team, ACG teams proceeded with  deployment of 9 VMs. Based on the inputs from the customer; the Test Failover of the first batch of the VMs  was scheduled in an isolated Virtual Network.  

Phase 3 – Final Failover 

Based on the remarks and official confirmation from the customer’s data team, the final Failover on the  production network was successfully performed.  

Post Implementation Benefits  

Reduced maintenance overhead of the infrastructure 

Better compliance with mobility 

Optimal user experience and faster content delivery 

Uninterrupted processing with no down times