Challenge:

KIMS hospital had Internal facing Hospital Information Management System (HIMS) application and other in-house application running in an on-premises data center for approximately 600 users consisting of administration department, accounts and finance department, doctors, and pharmacist. They have experienced frequent outages and failures in past few months which led to significant loss in business productivity. KIMS agreed to move the business-critical workloads to Cloud. They also wanted to achieve the business continuity without much impact on Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Solution:

Redington carried out a thorough assessment of KIMS on-premises data center, studied the environment clearly and a detailed inventory list was prepared by considering the following parameters:

• Number of Servers to be moved
• Different types of operating system and evaluation of security at operating system level
• Processor and memory required for the application, user concurrency and various utilization levels
• Storage growth rate, utilization, and configuration
• Methodologies and frequency of backup and restore requirements

In the review process, Redington identified that the applications could be transitioned based on:

• Integration and dependencies points
• Performances of applications
• Remote access disk consumption
• The growth rate of user with a clear road map towards the Cloud

Redington followed the best practices mentioned in Center for Internet Security (CIS) guidelines throughout the implementation. Complete AWS resources were effectively monitored and protected using Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail. Data was secured while in transit and at rest using AWS managed encryption along with key storage and key management. Redington established AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection between KIMS Data center and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to enable secure communication between them.

KIMS agreed to Redington’s suggestion of moving 80 percent of the KIMS business-critical workload to Cloud. By using AWS VM Import/Export service, all virtual machines were migrated to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage. Post migration, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances were launched from Amazon S3. All the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes were encrypted hence, snapshots of the volumes were also encrypted to keep up the security in priority as per the KIMS Requirement.

Outcome:

By migrating the workload to Cloud, availability of the workload was achieved. Also, operation tasks like monitoring, log analysis, backing up of data have been automated and reduced the manual intervention.

Low-cost backup strategy was implemented to protect their data using AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. This saved over 60 percent of cost compared to the proposed on-premises backup solution. Additionally, KIMS were able to achieve availability and durability for their backed-up data.