How a healthcare giant underwent a perfect Azure migration thanks to SHI

SHI’s expert planning leads to a successful Azure migration – without any disruptions to patient care.

Challenge:

Now more than ever, patients rely on healthcare companies to efficiently and securely manage their confidential data. A large healthcare conglomerate needed to modernize their IT infrastructure to support patients at home while ensuring regulatory compliance and maintaining patient data privacy. They turned to SHI as their strategic Microsoft partner to help them design and implement a comprehensive cloud infrastructure solution that could meet their needs without breaking the bank.

Having experienced data center outages throughout the previous year, the company needed to increase reliability and ensure business continuity. And with acquisitions being a major part of their growth strategy, our customer required scalable and adaptive infrastructure that could smoothly integrate new organizations into their environment.

They recognized their legacy infrastructure couldn’t handle the rapid growth they were experiencing while also addressing changing patient needs and compliance requirements like HIPAA. Lacking the in-house expertise needed to execute a project like this, they relied on SHI’s experience to modernize their infrastructure, enable their team, and empower them to confidently scale at speed.

Solution:

To begin the migration, SHI created an Azure landing zone acting as the foundation to build their cloud environment in a consistent and scalable way. The landing zone was designed to meet HIPAA and other regulatory requirements while also enabling quick and safe up- and down-scaling.

This landing zone included several key components, including:

• Networking: SHI designed a virtual network enabling secure communication between onsite and cloud resources. The network was segmented into different security zones to provide granular control over traffic flows.
• Identity and access management: SHI deployed Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to manage user identities and cloud resource access. This provided users a single sign-on experience and helped ensure only authorized individuals could access sensitive data.
• Security: SHI leveraged Azure Security Center to monitor and protect the healthcare company's cloud workloads. The team also deployed Azure Sentinel, a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) service, to provide advanced threat detection and response capabilities.
• Governance: With our Azure Policy implementation, our customer could define and enforce policies for resource management and compliance. This lowered their risk exposure and decreased management overhead, boosting operational efficiency and performance.
• Monitoring and management: Thanks to Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics, the company could quickly identify and address any environmental issues or anomalies.

We meticulously planned the process of migrating the customer’s critical systems and data to minimize downtime and ensure patient information remained accessible throughout the transition.

Lastly, SHI optimized and future-proofed their Azure environment and with monitoring tools, disaster recovery, automated backups and patching, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Upon conclusion of our services, SHI’s experts gave the customer a playbook to ensure continuous reliability, security, performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence.

Outcome:

Thanks to SHI’s deep Microsoft expertise and calculated approach, our healthcare customer was able to decrease downtime, increase service performance, meet regulatory compliance requirements, and improve patient care.

Having established a secure and scalable Azure foundation that can support future acquisitions and provide access to real-time insights into patient data, our customer can now make data-driven decisions and improve patient outcomes. The success of this project demonstrates the value of cloud-based solutions and the importance of choosing an experienced partner to help reach your ideal state.