One of the top 10 U.S. healthcare providers was migrating application workloads from on-premises to cloud hosting models. This required diverting internal IT resources with institutional knowledge of their business and applications.

Challenges

Reassigning internal IT resources to support the migration effort left a critical void in continuing day-to-day IT engineering, operations, and administration support of existing systems. The provider initially requested individual contractors to fill these roles, which would have burdened IT managers to onboard, train, and oversee each of these individuals — straining already stretched IT management.

Our solution

We proposed and delivered an “as a service” solution approach that offloaded the client’s IT management burden while the permanent IT team focused on cloud migration. We provided a curated team of skilled professionals covering each of the needed functions.  As part of this work, we oversaw and supported the team, including giving monthly program-level status, issues reporting, and action plans to the company.  Scope of services encompassed Windows server, cloud, and storage administration; Active Directory and messaging support; network operations; and IT service management engineering. 

Transition into a steady state was completed within a relatively short timeframe and with minimal impact on the company’s IT management.  Following this project, the company went through a complex merger.

Based on the success of this initial project, the merged company subsequently contracted with us for a staff augmentation team to assist them in their efforts to aggressively consolidate from 10 data centers down to 3 data centers.  The intent of the project was to generate large cost savings both from the consolidation and from movement of many workloads to more agile cloud environments. 

As part of the project, the team is also involved in moving Hitachi storage to the cloud, making sure workloads on Windows servers are ready for the cloud, and assisting with networking.  The target cloud environment is multi-cloud, with Azure, AWS, and Google each being used for different purposes.

Business outcomes

Our solution enabled the client to focus its critical resources on its aggressive migration to the cloud while alleviating the burden of maintaining existing systems and operations:

• Fixed-price, as-a-service convenience and predictability with SLAs resulted in savings of $80,000 compared to contracting individuals.  
• Reduced risk and increased success of the in-scope engineering, operations, and administration functions via Celsior’s ongoing oversight and program status reporting
• Refocusing of the client’s own IT resources from time-consuming operations tasks to the more strategic IT cloud imperative

The second project in support of the data center consolidations continues to move forward to meet the client’s critical need for cost synergies to provide affordable healthcare.  Although it’s still too early to fully evaluate the results of this multi-year initiative, the company continues to be very happy with our contribution to this high-importance project and continues to give us more responsibility.