How a major Health System got onto AWS: Recapping the featured session today at AWS re:Invent
Datica Alumni — Former Chief Marketing Officer
David Deas and Memphis Le Bonheur (MLH) have a mandate to improve patient care, improve the lives of clinicians, and save the organization money in the process.
As a 20+ year veteran of healthcare and a computer scientist by trade, David knows a thing or two about how to get work done within the confines of healthcare’s regulations or internal IT politics. He was the leader in implementing Cerner at MLH in the 90s. Now, in his role as head of innovation at MLH, he’s charged with faster-paced objectives where speed-to-market is imperative.
Internal IT has been less than helpful. On stage today, David spoke about the “Ticket Hell” he has to go through to provision any technical resources for his team.
Internal IT will only ever budget the necessary compute cores and hard drives needed for what has been forecasted a year out. When fast-paced projects come online, it is always “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” as David described.
The cloud is a perfect solution for his team. Unfortunately, he faced a compounding resource problem: None of his team members were DevOps or security experts, and he would never be granted authority to hire for this skillset since it would become a “shadow IT” risk to the security group.
In stepped Datica.
As a HITRUST CSF Certified platform, any issues with trusting an external partner were immediately calmed. “Everyone at MLH put their weapons away and instead started to talk about how to solve problems,” David said on stage to the audience.
Datica helped David become a partner to the internal IT and internal security teams. “When I heard that Datica would take direct calls from my security group, I knew I found a partner who could help me be successful,” he added.
Because of how Datica removes the DevOps and DevSecOps burdens associated with putting workloads on the cloud, he didn’t need to hire new staff members. His team of developers can spin up new containers and environments in a matter of minutes vs. months. They’ve already shipped more projects in 2017 while using Datica than they ever thought was possible.
The session then turned to Adam Leko, Datica’s CTO & CISO. Adam dived into the technical specifics of how the platform worked.
After speaking to the technology we orchestrate in order to achieve HITRUST credibility, Adam spoke to the AWS primitives we enable. Of the 57 AWS Services, 27 are under their Business Associate Agreement. Almost all of the 27 are enabled via the Datica Platform. Adam spoke to the different services, like EC2, VPCs, and so on, but especially how those services are configured within an enhanced shared responsibility model.
From there Adam shared the typical deployment model MLH’s team uses to push their workloads to the Datica Platform and subsequently AWS.
The session was greeted with a positive response. For those who came up after the session was over, thank you for your questions and feedback. For those we weren’t able to talk to before the room was closed, you can find us at booth #519. We have team members here all week who can help answer any compliance or security questions on AWS.
