A 42-clinic US healthcare group struggled with slow morning logins and single-site server outages across its electronic health record (EHR) and imaging portals. SNWN migrated their workloads to an encrypted AWS and Microsoft Azure architecture using Terraform and automated failover, backed by a 24/7 NOC and SRE team. The network now runs at 99.99% availability, resolves alerts 63% faster, and spends 34% less on annual infrastructure.
What Was Slowing Down Daily Patient Care
Every weekday around 8:30 AM, front-desk staff and doctors across 42 clinics logged into the patient portal and radiology viewer at the same time. Because core databases still ran on aging hardware in a single co-location facility, a single storage bottleneck slowed down appointments across three states.
Key Operational Bottlenecks Before the Project
- Morning login spikes caused 8 to 12 second delays when doctors opened patient charts and X-ray scans.
- Weekend patching required four-hour maintenance windows that disrupted urgent care clinics.
- The internal IT team of five engineers had to handle night-shift server alerts manually on top of daytime projects.
How We Migrated and Stabilized the Platform Step by Step
Instead of a risky all-at-once cutover, our cloud architects broke the work into four clear phases so clinics never lost access to patient charts.
Mapped Every Clinical Workload and HIPAA Control
During the first two weeks, we audited 94 virtual machines, storage volumes, and HL7 interfaces. We separated latency-sensitive EHR databases from heavy radiology image archives and built a HIPAA security checklist covering encryption keys, private VPC peering, and audit logging.
Built Repeatable AWS and Azure Landing Zones with Terraform
We wrote clean Terraform modules to provision primary clinical compute on AWS and active disaster recovery standby on Microsoft Azure. Private site-to-site VPN tunnels connected clinic routers directly to cloud endpoints without exposing databases to the public internet.
Synced Live Data and Cut Over Clinic Groups in Waves
Using continuous block-level and database log replication, we kept legacy and cloud servers in sync down to the second. We cut clinics over in four Sunday-night waves of 10 to 12 sites each, verifying printer routing, lab feeds, and SSO logins before Monday morning.
Turned On 24/7 NOC Monitoring and Automated Self-Healing
Once live, our 24/7 SRE team connected Prometheus, Grafana, and PagerDuty alerts to pre-tested Ansible runbooks. Disk cleanups, stuck print queues, and container restarts now trigger automatically, while senior engineers respond to critical alerts in under 10 minutes.
What Changed for Doctors, Staff, and IT Leadership
Within the first quarter after cutover, morning slowdowns disappeared and the internal IT team got their evenings and weekends back.
Sustained EHR Uptime
Zero unplanned clinic outages across 12 consecutive months of operation.
Faster Incident Resolution
Mean time to repair dropped from 74 minutes to 27 minutes with 24/7 SRE coverage.
Lower Annual Cloud & Server Spend
Right-sized instances and tiered S3/Blob cold storage cut recurring infrastructure bills.
Day-to-Day Business Impact
- Chart and imaging load times dropped from 10 seconds to under 1.6 seconds during Monday morning peaks.
- Passed independent HIPAA security and disaster-recovery audits with zero remediation findings.
- Freed the internal 5-person IT team to focus on opening six new outpatient clinics.
Tools, Platforms, and Technologies Used
Every component in this deployment was selected for long-term stability, clear observability, and straightforward handover so internal engineers never get locked into black-box scripts.
Cloud & Infrastructure Services
See how our specialists design, migrate, and manage workloads like this every day.
Frequently Asked Questions About This Project
How did SNWN migrate live healthcare databases without clinic downtime?
We used continuous database log replication to keep cloud instances synced in real time with on-premise servers, then switched clinic groups in short Sunday-night waves taking less than 15 minutes per wave.
How is HIPAA compliance maintained across AWS and Azure?
All patient data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with customer-managed KMS keys, isolated inside private subnets with strict IAM role separation and immutable CloudTrail and Azure Monitor logs.
What does SNWN's 24/7 SRE team handle day to day?
Our engineers monitor server health around the clock, apply OS and security patches in rolling zero-downtime windows, test monthly disaster-recovery failovers, and triage P1 alerts in under 15 minutes.
