Our client, a medical diagnostics organization, is a leader in transforming medical diagnostic testing in the U.S. They continue to bring cutting-edge diagnostic solutions to the health testing and vaccination ecosystem of employers, health plans, and government entities. Based on their breaking-edge capabilities and processes, the organization has been repeatedly recognized for their very high revenue growth.

Challenge

The client needed a more dynamic and scalable environment for their evolving application development and testing operations. Colocation and support costs were increasing as they struggled to keep up with their fast-changing dev / test needs. Internal IT resources were spending significant effort to maintain and operate the fast-changing environment. Unfortunately, this was taking time away from strategic, higher-priority initiatives. To deal with these issues, they were interested in moving to the cloud, but first wanted to make sure that this made sense and to ensure that the public cloud would meet their needs.

Our solution

Celsior started work by doing a rapid assessment of the existing dev / test environment and confirming the feasibility of migrating to Azure. We then designed and created the Azure configurations / target environment and performed the actual migration.

The migration included a mix of Wintel and CentOS systems, storage, and SQL database platforms. As a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program (CSP) provider, we took full responsibility and provided ongoing support for the Azure dev / test environment.

We also continue to provide infrastructure management and “run” of the Azure hosting environment through a five year managed services contract.

Business outcomes

The modernized, secure, and scalable Azure dev / test environment resulted in:

• Reduction of hosting operations “run” costs by 55%
• Reduction in provisioning / deprovisioning times from days or weeks down to hours
• Increased environment reliability through more proactive and preventative management
• Ability for the client to refocus their own IT resources from time-consuming operations tasks to more strategic, higher-impact IT imperatives

In a separate project, the client asked Celsior to migrate a set of mission critical applications from on-premises to a managed Azure cloud. The driver for this project was supporting business demands and growth. As part of the project, they also wanted to address intermittent timeouts and latency issues. Our solution prepared an end-to-end plan for migrating the SQL Server database to a managed Azure SQL instance with minimal downtime.

The migration was facilitated by the high level of compatibility between on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL. The completed project scaled down the burden of maintaining infrastructure and reduced infrastructure costs by 40%. The new environment provided high flexibility for changing CPU and storage resources online. Furthermore, it provided high database availability for the users.