Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud

Brandon JonesBusiness Strategy, Case Studies, Cloud and Virtualization, OfferingsLeave a Comment

Healthcare lift and shift to AWS

The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud.

The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of tools that could be repeated across any of OIO’s application portfolio. The primary tool in this set was AWS CloudFormation, which was used to create a programmable template that leveraged parameter variables to facilitate all of the AWS features needed while allowing the support team to understand common code across all of the infrastructure stacks.

We implemented a replatforming migration strategy for most of the portfolio to modernize legacy operating systems and mitigate security concerns from those legacy systems.

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, M&S developed an application migration approach that took advantage of the AWS Cloud while maintaining efficient costs. At OIO, we implemented a replatforming migration strategy for most of the portfolio to modernize legacy operating systems and mitigate security concerns from those legacy systems. Due to large volumes of data stored on some of the healthcare applications, our team used a hybrid approach that leveraged new Microsoft Windows 2016 servers for the replatform and legacy volumes replicated to AWS via AWS Server Migration Service. This allowed OIO to minimize downtime during the migration cutover, as large portions of the data were in sync prior to cutover. Infrastructure as code principles were leveraged through CloudFormation. The use of CloudFormation facilitated a repeatable approach that was used on each application. It also provided the ability to leverage flexibility through parameterization with reusable master templates.

Prior to migration, we worked to create a security landing zone for OIO that could accommodate the variety of OIO applications to be migrated. To achieve this, strong security techniques were used to maintain the integrity of the environment, such as AWS Guard Duty to monitor malicious activity and behavior. Additionally, AWS Simple Systems Manager was leveraged for patch management, maintenance, and inventory. AWS S3 was used for durable storage providing encryption of data at rest. Lastly, due to the critical nature of health and patient-related data, the need for strong and reliable backup and recovery solutions was paramount. To meet this need, the team implemented N2WS’s Cloud Protection Manager (CPM).

…overall improvement in scalability, system performance, fault-tolerance, security, and availability.

At the end of the migration, OIO experienced an overall improvement in scalability, system performance, fault-tolerance, security, and availability. Their datacenter containing vital healthcare applications were upgraded and migrated into the cloud with new infrastructure that allowed for expanded disaster recovery, monitoring, security, and scaling capabilities while minimizing cost. Since the migration, OIO has continued its AWS success and merged additional hospitals into the cloud and absorbed their data without major upfront investments.

We would love to talk to you about how M&S can develop and execute a plan to move your business or organization to the cloud. Just drop us a line on out Contact Us page.

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