AWS Cloud

Your application is experiencing increased traffic and it’s becoming difficult to scale resources to meet the increasing demand. Or you may be working with massive data volumes or complex environments under additional legislative regulations, like HIPAA.

While the cloud has a lot to offer, the migration process can be risky. Before migrating to a cloud environment, organizations must thoroughly plan and come up with a definite digital product strategy.

Unfortunately, many companies overlook this and end up with losses during or after cloud migration. It’s also crucial to ensure that all the people involved in the migration process are aware of their areas of responsibility. All these aspects have to be considered before the cloud data migration.

The client provides software solutions to private medical practices and institutions to keep the patient’s records and facilitate communication between patients and healthcare professionals.

Our client rented a server that was quite expensive. Additionally, it didn’t provide an appropriate level of scalability and performance.

To save money, as well as improve the app performance, our team recommended relocating an organization’s data, applications, and workloads to a cloud infrastructure. Our client decided to migrate the existing database and web app backend to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

That was the case for our client who would need a partner able to ensure the migration to the cloud quickly, with minimal risk and a high degree of reliability.

Our team was responsible for orchestration and tech support of the entire process of a migration to cloud infrastructure, from planning to the monitoring and management of a fully transitioned cloud environment. We wanted to do all the preliminary work in a quality manner so that the migration process would take less time, without data loss.

The main challenge was to reduce the likelihood of data getting lost or corrupted during the migration and to minimize the potential impact on the business. In addition, we have to strictly comply with all HIPAA requirements.

Our client wanted migration to be handled quickly, affordably, and without system disruption. Migration to the cloud would allow our client to manage resources more efficiently as well as increase project performance. Also, we would manage to reduce the time needed to maintain a good infrastructure.

Our role was to orchestrate the entire migration process as well as to identify and fix emerging problems.

The first step was to conduct a comprehensive review of the existing IT infrastructure and develop a cloud migration strategy. The strategy included pragmatic recommendations and a migration roadmap for secure and seamless moving to the cloud step-by-step. We used AWS Database Migration Service to move data between our HIPAA-compliant applications.

Test run helped us to validate our migration plan against any challenges as well as ensuring that all the data would be successfully migrated. The test run also gave us a more detailed picture of the overall time that migration would take.

Cloud migration is accompanied by a need for additional resources to facilitate the migration. In our case, the client provided a DevOps engineer and our team was responsible for managing the entire process of migration – developing a cloud migration plan, following the HIPAA regulations, assessing workloads, conducting migration testing, etc. Our team was carefully prepared and trained and everyone knew their areas of responsibility in this process. We chose a HIPAA-compliant AWS cloud, set up a testing environment to make sure that the IT environment is set correctly.

We deployed the project in a new environment. Then we took a test database and checked the integration (this can be done without downtime). The task here was to check whether the code works properly.

When all the checks were done, we paused our production and started copying the database and reconfigure DNS to new API addresses. Then we conducted the final check. We then migrated the existing data and the client received a much lower level of costs to maintain the project in good technical condition.