Healthcare Agency Builds a Strong Cloud Foundation for Governance and Security

Background

A provincial healthcare agency has a big mandate: broker healthcare and technology services to healthcare providers throughout its province. As the primary healthcare authority in the province, the organization’s mandate is to coordinate regional healthcare services to ensure the efficient delivery of clinical services and bringing critical healthcare services closer to where people live.

The agency centralizes several business services such as payroll and HR, and provides centralized computing services to deliver business and clinical services to other provincial healthcare providers such as hospitals, lab systems, and pharmacies.

The Challenge

With the patient population growing and a significant increase in the number of services it is mandated to deliver, the agency’s on-premises data centre couldn’t handle the exponential growth of its workloads.

To meet business and clinical requirements, the organization needed to go online fast with new applications and services to ensure citizens have access to a coordinated network of high-quality specialized healthcare services. For efficiency, it also needed to consolidate its technology services across disparate internal groups.

Migrating all or part of its workloads to the cloud was a logical solution to get quick and cost-effective scalability and bring many new applications online quickly. But the agency didn’t have in-house expertise to make the cloud operable, sustainable, and scalable. Specifically, the organization wanted to build a solid cloud foundation to ensure compliance with stringent governance and security mandates.

Since many provincial healthcare organizations will come to depend on the agency’s ability to run a reliable cloud operation that meets the healthcare needs of Canadians, it needed an operating model that would work across clouds and internal departments.

Being steeped in traditional approaches to technology, the organization was looking for a partner that’s on the leading edge of cloud adoption and has the experience to give the agency an expedited path to scalability in the cloud.

To get up to speed with the cloud quickly and get consistent operational governance to support a multi-cloud environment, the agency selected OpsGuru as a technology partner.

OpsGuru was a good fit for this project because of its extensive experience with hundreds of cloud migrations across cloud providers. OpsGuru also has a deep background in the healthcare industry and understands its requirements for data privacy and compliance, including standards such as HIPAA and NIST. The agency also appreciated OpsGuru’s ability to understand its business needs and challenges, and the ability to explain technology recommendations in the context of a business rationale.

Our Solution

The OpsGuru team started with an assessment of the organization’s environment. The team found that a key challenge in building a governance framework was the agency’s diverse internal groups, each with its own priorities and ideas about cloud governance and security. Some internal groups had already been experimenting with AWS, but the organization wanted more confidence on the platform before going into a migration.

To get consistency in best practices across a multi-cloud environment and across the agency’s diverse internal groups, OpsGuru delivered a model for infrastructure, migration, and implementation, including the tools and processes needed to implement security and governance in the cloud and promote security to end-users.

Because the agency acts as a broker for healthcare and technology services, OpsGuru showed the agency how to do chargebacks and showbacks, and how to write contracts with its partner healthcare agencies. A clear charging model helps build confidence and manage expectations in the budgeting process.

OpsGuru also helped the agency develop a cloud-native mindset to help it understand how to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud rather than use the cloud simply as an extension of its on-premises infrastructure.

The Result

As a result of OpsGuru’s consulting work, the agency now has a strong foundation in cloud-based operational governance. This foundation includes a shared responsibility model that defines the roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, giving it internal alignment on the implementation of best practices and its cloud adoption goals. In addition, the organization also has a strong foundation in security and governance for external needs to ensure information privacy and compliance with legislation.

OpsGuru delivered the light at the end of the cloud adoption tunnel the organization was looking for. With a strong cloud foundation in place and a clear roadmap for governance and security, the agency is now running experiments as a prelude to consolidating systems and migrating workloads to AWS, which the organization has confirmed as its primary cloud provider. The agency is looking forward to working with OpsGuru as needed with the next steps in its cloud journey.