Picture this. It's 2020 and tens of millions are lined up for admissions with 'you-know-what' symptoms. Hospital premises across the country are buzzing, doctors and staff are firefighting like warriors, administration systems wailing with the non-stop 24/7 stress. And, then like a sneaky catastrophe, the patient admission application fails; millions stranded with misfortune and misery. The failure could be due to an untimely downtime, likely to be resolved in seconds, or even more severe. What if there was a bug in an update pushed an hour back into the application module? What if the admission applet was not designed and deployed as a microservice but was part of a larger monolithic blob? When associated with healthcare, every second and every line of code counts.
The above scenario, needless to mention, is imaginary and might sound impossible today, to contemporary software engineers. And that's because of DevOps; the universe of tools it offers to make lives easier for software developers and the cultural shift it has brought to the IT industry. As industries, including healthcare, become explosively software driven from core operations to consumer engagements, the onus is on application and service providers to build, innovate, and release new solutions or modifications faster than ever at next to nil errors; often in hours or days. Without DevOps, this could quickly turn into a manual nightmare. The following story highlights better; how Cloud4C and AWS helped one of India's leading Insurance TPAs clean up its operational hassles and embrace its digital vision with cloud-native DevOps.
Mission cost-effective care services for all
The noble vision continues to shape the trajectory of this Insurance TPA, a behemoth in India's gargantuan healthcare and associated services industry. Founded two decades back, the firm facilitates the insured with hassle-free hospital experiences in times of need; cashless admissions, tele-care and diagnostics, super-fast claims settlements, and more. Notably, the TPA has settled over 3 million claims so far, impacting 75+ million lives across a network of 8500+ hospitals in India. As a trusted partner for the nation's top health insurers, they also render advanced digital solutions such as medical underwriting operations including ECG reading, XRT/Cough, postpone and decline of policies, counter offers, etc.
Transformation in need? Automation indeed: The case for DevOps
Post pandemic, the health sector was well suited for disruption. Regulatory changes, digital demands, and uncertain supply markets forced providers to rethink operations. For the Insurance TPA, this also served as an opportunity, architecting a single stop quality platform entirely dedicated to deliver service excellence and utmost client, patient satisfaction. That necessitated analyzing few silos in the TPA's operational and development landscapes, obstacles that could be best addressed with a DevOps shift:
- Slower product and application update release cycles
- Lags in factoring regulatory changes associated with health data and IT
- Downtimes associated with every new release, impacting business
- Stagnant customer engagements due to lack in quick innovations
- Risks associated with new tool integrations
- Rising cost of operations, resource redundancies
Powering agility of operations at one-third the cost with AWS-native DevOps
Cloud4C, the world's leading application-focused cloud MSP and a trusted DevOps partner with dedicated Centers of Excellence, allied with AWS to engineer a fully automated continuous integration and delivery system with cloud-native tools. AWS CloudFormation, for instance, was integrated to define and architect all the server environments required for core dev, build, testing, staging, and production. Tools like AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeArtifact were connected in sync to ensure end-to-end automation of the software development lifecycle right from when the source code is pushed to central repo to its evaluation, security testing, and final live deployment.
Docker was introduced for containerization whereas concurrent pipelines were configured to minimize build waits and ensure microservice deployments can run in parallel. This significantly impacted the go to market timelines, cutting down live releases from 2 months to 3-4 weeks! Automation with DevOps on AWS also meant fewer errors and less room for redundant tasks, improving productivity by 20-30% and a steep 30% cost savings on development processes alone!
Security and compliance management is central to solution providers, even more so for the Insurance TPA concerned, dealing with PIIs and critical health data of millions. To ensure continuous security, Cloud4C helped implement AWS Encryption SDK, utilizing KMS-protected data encryption keys to encrypt locally within their applications. Source codes were securely accessed through IAM SSH credentials. While, AWS CloudTrail provided the firm's internal teams with logs of all keys' usage to help meet regulatory and compliance needs.
The end customers were ensured a near zero downtime on their critical service requirements via the TPA's platform.
Read the whole story here
Top AWS-native services deployed for the Insurance TPA: Tools that should be in every firm's DevOps quiver
AWS CloudFormation
An Infrastructure-as-Code solution to seamlessly provision, manage, and control multiple AWS resources and connected third-party platforms
AWS CodePipeline
A CI-CD ecosystem for super-fast infrastructure and application related updates. Automatically builds, tests, deploys code every time there’s any requisite update. Particularly helpful for releasing quick feature updates or patches
AWS CodeCommit
Much like a GitHub but native to AWS, this is a fully managed source code repository for code files storage, collaboration, and implementation of CI-CD pipelines
AWS CodeBuild
A fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code files committed to the repositories, runs tests, and produces builds/ready-to-deploy software packages
AWS CodeArtifact
A managed artifact repository ecosystem allowing secure storage, collaboration, and control of newly built, containerized software packages or artifacts
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Native service for deploying and scaling web applications and services across environments
AWS Key Management Service
Automatic creation, integration, and management of cryptographic keys across all applications developed and AWS resources used for tight security
AWS CloudTrail
Enabling risk monitoring and governance, compliance management across the entire AWS landscape and native services deployed
Amazon DynamoDB
A NoSQL database, flexible for storing and managing wide variety of data types, utilizes ML to automatically manage capacity and optimize performance
Amazon Aurora
MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database solution leveraging AI-ML solutions to automatically tune DB parameters, scale capacity, and optimize performance
Amazon CloudWatch
An intelligent, round the stack monitoring service
AWS CloudTrail
Operational and risk auditing, governance and compliance management of the AWS landscape
Amazon Kinesis
Fully managed intelligent service for data streaming from variety of sources including IoT devices, applications, platforms
Amazon QuickSight
Fully managed BI service utilized for automatic publishing of intuitive reports and dashboards
Cloud4C, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner has helped Fortune 500 companies scale their digital ambitions with fully managed AWS services. Frequent implementations include migration to a well architected AWS environment, modernizations with AWS-native service integrations, DevOps on AWS implementations, security management, containerization deployment and management, and remote AWS infrastructure and overall AWS managed services. Cloud4C's risk-proof mission-critical cloud transformation frameworks aided by in-country compliant hosting solutions render fool-proof and super cost-effective outcomes for enterprises across healthcare, energy, BFSI, manufacturing, transportation, F&B etc.
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