Migration from self-hosted private cloud to AWS cloud

25 Jul 2023 Alex Gora

Our customer is a rapidly developing digitized medical company. They were running a large healthcare platform connecting patients with medical imaging providers. The customer’s infrastructure stored terabytes of healthcare-related data, including Private Health Information (PHI). Their databases were based on a private cloud hosted on one of the data centers in the United States. The customer’s team was responsible for maintaining their hardware and infrastructure, including virtualization through VMware vSphere and MySQL. The customer also had SysOps and DBA personnel responsible for managing their environment.

Migration to AWS for enhanced data security

The customer decided to migrate to the manageable AWS environment, primarily, because of its strong data security capabilities that would strengthen their HIPAA posture. AWS is known for its rich portfolio of native security tools and boundless opportunities for integration with the best monitoring and data protection solutions. The main challenge was migrating to fully managed Amazon RDS servers while recreating all functionality and infrastructure in the new cloud location. Failure to complete this migration successfully would dramatically drop the customer’s performance or lead them to far-reaching security or reliability faults.

ABCloudz Solution

The ABCloudz team used self-developed tools for migrating the data to the target location. Data included files previously stored on network storages and in DB instances. As a result, we transferred all the data to the AWS Cloud. The customer received three environments for their applications: development, production, and stage. A visual representation of the environment is available below.

True Vault migration schema

Our team was focused on configuring a HIPAA-compliance, security, and scalability for the customer’s system. ​​We integrated Laika, Security Hub, and Detective for security and compliance monitoring. Datadog became a solution for metrics and logs aggregation, platform monitoring, and alerting. AWS ELB was applied for distributing the incoming traffic across the backend services. We also utilized GitHub CI for CI/CD implementation. Finally, Terraform was used to create the infrastructure in the AWS cloud during the initial stages.

HIPAA-Compliant, scalable, and secure data infrastructure on AWS

The customer migrated its data infrastructure from a costly and non-scalable third-party database as a service solution to a fully managed Amazon AWS Cloud. They now have:

  • Secure architecture that complies with HIPAA rules, ensuring robust fortification of all PHI (Protected Health Information).
  • Quality security monitoring using Security Hub, Detective, and CloudWatch.
  • More efficient CI/CD pipelines through GitHub CI.
  • A fully manageable data infrastructure with environmental isolation for dev, prod, and stage environments within the company’s AWS Organizations.
  • Smooth traffic distribution between the applications with AWS ELB and AWS CloudFront.
  • Scalable and highly available solution leveraging CloudFront, RDS, and ECS.
  • A 30% increase in read/write performance and a 50% reduction in database-related downtime.

Our custom practices enabled us to meet and exceed customer deadlines. As a result, the migration was conducted in 1 month instead of the expected 3 months.

Ready to enhance your data infrastructure with unmatched security and scalability? Migrate to HIPAA-compliant, fully managed AWS Cloud with ABCloudz today! Contact us now to get started!

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