Empowering Healthcare Transformation: Building a Future-Ready Azure Eco-System for Legacy System Migration and Advanced Workloads

Nov 23, 2023

About the Client

Customer is a faith-based, nonprofit health system that cares for more patients in North Texas than any other provider. We serve North Texas through the Texas Health Physicians Group, hospitals, outpatient facilities, Neighborhood Care & Wellness Centers, home health, and preventive and fitness services.

Executive Summary

The customer has started a multi-phase initiative to modernize their on-prem legacy applications, storage, and compute services. The project was delivered to provide a foundational Azure Eco-System that would support current legacy system migration and future complex workloads and use cases focusing on Bot Services, IoT, Data Lake Architectures, and Machine Learning applications

We worked with the customer to come up with an Azure Reference architecture delivering flexibility to quickly deploy multiple types of use cases and an initial workload environment for a Spark/Kubernetes web-based customer interaction application that is system agnostic. The foundation system is designed to deliver their need for performance, scalability, and high availability and provides them with a path to production via a well-defined and repeatable DevOps CI/CD pipeline delivery system.

Goals

  • Discover, define, and deliver a foundational architecture to support vertical and horizontal application deployments in multiple topics: The customer wanted to explore ways of modernizing their on-prem application workloads and providing an environment for delivering new technologies and applications. The customer was looking for a solution that kept portions of on-prem systems intact and at the same gain the benefits of cloud
  • Implement all Infrastructure and application elements as code: The Customer wanted a system that was 100% automated and controlled by CI/CD pipelines. This included the underlying infrastructure and the application/workload applications.
  • Provide Secure and defensible connectivity to the on-premise & hybrid cloud infrastructure: All aspects of security and defensibility were implemented and tested to ensure adherence to the customer's policy and Government Policies.

Solutions and Outcomes

As part of POC, we proposed a modern cloud-native scalable architecture using Azure Native infrastructure, Azure Kubernetes, Azure WAF, and Azure Public and Private Network components.

We implemented POC of the architecture and demonstrated scalable end-to-end scalability for applications from VDI's to Complex Machine Learning applications.

The customer is delighted with the validated Foundation architecture and is in the process of planning the next phase of Use Cases to take advantage of the Architecture and tools now available to their internal and external teams.

The solution has been defined through the completion of the following activities.

  • High-level problem exploration, analysis, and architectural proposals
  • Setup of Azure "Labs' environment for DevOps and CI/CD build and testing
  • Delivery of Cloud and On-premise network, DNS, and AD integration secured with Multi Site-to-Site VPN
  • Kubernetes and first use case utilizing the K8's environment
  • Set up Geo-replication, failover, and high availability for dedicated production zones and resources.
  • Delivery and connection of all Azure logging and incident management logging to Qradar for in-house monitoring and management
  • Validation of end-to-end architecture from data, network, DevOps, User, and application Ingress/Egress. Preformed Multiple Deploy and Destroy DR scenarios
  • Best practice recommendation around data replication, Azure storage management, monitoring etc.
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