AWS Foundation and Migration Proof of Concept
A Story of Owning Change
About Casenet
Casenet provides a comprehensive suite of enterprise care management software and services solutions for commercial, Medicaid, Medicare, Third Party Administrator, Provider / Accountable Care Organization and specialty provider organizations that have multiple lines of business and require comprehensive configurations for each member population. Healthcare organizations rely on Casenet’s population health management solutions to improve care coordination and the quality and delivery of care through enhanced case, disease, utilization, and home- and community-based services management. Casenet’s solutions empower organizations to adapt quickly to changing market and regulatory dynamics and to identify and target populations having unique risk characteristics with specific care management programs—taking the first step toward better individual health and total population health management.
Casenet has been planning to transition its applications to the cloud and needed the type of AWS expertise 1Strategy offers to be successful … Our engagement with 1Strategy has been very pleasant and rewarding.
—Hussam Zawil, Director of Software Development, Casenet
The Challenge
Healthcare organizations depend on Casenet’s application, TruCare, for personalized care management. TruCare is a highly customizable product with peak utilization during healthcare open enrollment, which is a period of a couple of months each year. In the on-premises environment, customers must provision the number of servers required to cover these two months of increased load. While this works, this means that much of that server capacity sits idle for 10 months of the year, draining management time and money.
Casenet wanted to change this for their customers. To get started, Casenet decided to embark on a cloud migration proof of concept for TruCare that focused on scalability, automation and establishment of a solid cloud foundation. Casenet was introduced to 1Strategy through TEKsystems Global Services, and the lift and shift of TruCare began.
Why Amazon Web Services
Casenet’s customers were increasingly inquiring about cloud offerings. Because Centene—Casenet’s parent company—had already been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement new microservices for their healthcare systems, they knew that AWS could give them the on-demand scaling they needed, plus high availability and well-isolated customer environments. Casenet felt inspired to create a cloud environment that could be used for a proof-of-concept migration of the current architecture, with an eye toward an eventual rearchitecture that would use microservices to support large and small customers alike. Casenet selected AWS because of their ability to auto scale with the computing needs of customers and due to the cost efficiency of many of their cloud services.
Additionally, AWS offers extensive support for high availability and HIPAA compliance, both must-haves for the Casenet team. Through collaboration with 1Strategy, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Casenet was able to build a platform in AWS for customers to leverage in the future and deliver a proof-of-concept migration of their critical application.
“Casenet has been planning to transition its applications to the cloud and needed the type of AWS expertise 1Strategy offers to be successful,” said Hussam Zawil, Casenet’s director of software development.
The Benefits
1Strategy’s collaboration with Casenet started from the ground up: creating a new account and organization structure that would promote ease of management and thorough isolation of customer workloads. After designing the account structure, AWS Control Tower was leveraged to jump-start the implementation. With one click of a button, AWS Control Tower provides a single sign-on solution (AWS SSO), separate permission sets for various users (admins, power users, finance team members and the like), security guardrails, automated account provisioning, and centralized security logging and billing. This meant that valuable time could be spent on finessing security guardrails instead of tedious, manual account creation and configuration.
With the account structure in place, a network architecture was next on the list. By using AWS Transit Gateway, a variety of other network components and Route 53, 1Strategy was able to design a network that allowed for seamless connectivity and DNS resolution between the on-premises and AWS environment. By coupling that with components to support encryption at rest and in transit (using AWS Key Management Service and AWS Certificate Manager), Casenet had a solid foundation upon which to build.
The focus then turned to the TruCare application, a single-tenant, traditional Windows application that utilizes a variety of Virtual Machines, file shares and SQL Server databases. Aside from the quality and features the TruCare app offers, it also provides a high degree of customization to meet customers’ needs. This meant that Casenet needed a simple, repeatable way to stand up multiple TruCare environments for each customer but in a way that would eventually allow for easy scaling and customization.
This kind of use case is tailor-made for a robust infrastructure-as-code solution, and using Terraform to create the Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon FSx file systems, and assorted databases and load balancers gave Casenet the repeatability they were after. Additionally, the infrastructure makes use of AWS Database Migration Service for easy database replication, as well as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups. Right now, those auto scaling groups are used to ensure high availability of various components; in the future, as TruCare components are refactored to support horizontal scaling, they will be used to dynamically scale the app in response to load.
“By migrating Casenet’s applications to AWS, we will be able to provide high availability and scalability while reducing costs,” said Zawil. “We will also be able to optimize and automate our deployment strategy into the cloud, which will significantly reduce our implementation time for new customers.”
Ultimately, this will give TruCare the desired resiliency and cost-effectiveness, along with all the other pieces that are “table stakes” in the healthcare context: customer isolation, security and HIPAA compliance. Plus, by partnering with 1Strategy, the Casenet team’s knowledge of and ability with AWS grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the project. The end result? Casenet is now well-positioned to leverage their new expertise, new AWS foundation and new proof of concept to take the TruCare application to the next level.
“In a short time, we were able to develop a POC of the lift and shift for our core product, TruCare, which was completed on time,” Zawil expressed. “Our engagement with 1Strategy has been very pleasant and rewarding in that we built the platform for TruCare in AWS and acquired the core AWS skills to move to the next step of our cloud strategy.”
The work described in this engagement was originally completed by 1Strategy, a TEKsystems Global Services company acquired in 2019. As of June 2023, 1Strategy has fully integrated with TEKsystems Global Services to continue to deliver AWS expertise to customers. Learn more about our AWS solutions.
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