Healthcare giant accelerates application modernization and cloud migration with Dynatrace

Application consolidation, modernization and cloud transformation

In an industry where rapid expansion is often the result of strategic acquisitions, as well as organic growth, many healthcare IT companies face significant overlap in capabilities and rising technical debt, which can significantly increase the cost of care. Years of growth had left one large healthcare company with over 10,000 applications, of which it identified that around 80% could be consolidated or retired to lower the cost of healthcare in the United States.

To achieve this, the company chose to pursue an application modernization and cloud migration strategy. It began with a private cloud, moving applications to virtual machines in its own data centre. To realize further value, it decided to embrace public cloud services and reimagine its applications in a microservices architecture. This presented new challenges, making it harder to maintain end-to-end observability across the entire IT stack. As such, it became more difficult to assure service availability and user experience; both of which are crucial in the healthcare industry.

Incomparable observability and availability

The large healthcare company has used Dynatrace for many years, having identified that it was key to providing the visibility it needed to succeed as it transitioned its services to a private cloud environment. After deciding to embrace the public cloud as the next step on this journey, the company identified that Dynatrace would be even more critical to maintaining the end-to-end observability it needed to trace transactions from the user all the way back to its hybrid, cloud-native environment.

Life with Dynatrace

• Advanced observability – The company still relies on a number of legacy applications to deliver its services successfully. As it continues to migrate towards a modern cloud platform, Dynatrace provides the observability needed to trace transactions end-to-end across the full stack and back into its legacy applications to identify and resolve any issues wherever they originate.
• Outside-in perspective on user journeys – Understanding how users navigate its systems is key to ensuring the company can create the best possible experiences. Dynatrace’s Session Replay capabilities allow the company to play back user sessions in a step-by-step, high definition video. This offers precise insight into how users interact with its services, so the company can proactively improve the design of digital journeys and optimize the user experience.
• Supporting faster innovation – Dynatrace enables the healthcare company’s DevOps teams to integrate automated quality gates within its CI/CD pipeline to ensure new code meets pre-defined performance baselines before being released into production. This helps teams to innovate faster, without the fear that functional code could inadvertently introduce performance defects.
• Ensuring peak availability – With large volumes of consumers accessing its systems during the company’s peak season, availability during these times is crucial. With the observability provided by Dynatrace, the large healthcare company achieved 99.98% availability for its systems during the last peak season: a significant accomplishment.

“Peak season is where we make or break it, so we put Dynatrace on every one of our critical peak season applications to get the visibility we needed. Looking at the numbers from the last peak season, we achieved levels of availability we’ve never been able to hit before, reaching 99.98%. Anyone that ever moved one of those decimals, from a .97% to a .98% knows how difficult that is. It’s been an amazing journey to get there. Ultimately, we don’t do anything that matters without Dynatrace,” the Chief Architect concluded.