Hybrid Cloud Workload Placement Strategy in Health Care
Project description and requirements
Our client, a significant health care payer, faced significant capital requirements to update the aging physical plant of its on-premises data center. At the same time, our client knew that some of its workload would eventually move to the cloud. Consequently, they engaged GTSG to answer several questions:
- Which workloads are best suited for the cloud, and which are not near-term candidates for migration?
- What will my on-prem data center look like in five years? Which workloads will remain, whether on-premises or in colocation?
- What level of investment is required to keep the data center functioning reliably? How should we balance any required investment with the move to the cloud- which also requires a significant outlay?
Engagement Approach
GTSG utilized our Workload Placement & Infrastructure Delivery Strategy methodology. GTSG has been refining this methodology since the industry transition which followed 9/11. We have of course updated our methodology for the full current range of cloud and hosted offerings.
Our team focused on a subset of business flows which accounted for the vast majority of the workload processed in the on-prem data center. This resulted in a Current State Analysis.
We then evaluated the go-forward alternatives: benefits the cloud could provide (agility to respond to customer requirements; steady-state cost where applicable) versus the investment required to migrating the workload. We identified workloads that were not a candidate for migration (in this case, notably those with embedded affinities to operating systems unsupported by public cloud providers).
For the analysis of the physical data center, we partnered with a well-known engineering firm to analyze the current state and define future requirements. We provided financial estimates for the upgrades required over the time horizon dictated by the workload placement analysis.
Client benefits
At the conclusion of the engagement, the client had
- The ability to project workload requirements over the next five years
- A workload placement strategy for the workloads under study. The financial model included costs for migration, estimate of steady state cloud costs, and other relevant cost elements. This provided our client with a decision model for the balance of the workloads.
- An understanding of the levels of effort required to migrate each workload
- For the on-prem physical data center, the financial forecast the client required for the next five years of capital investment.
As a result of our engagement, the client decided to exit its on-premises data center and migrate to colocation for enterprise managed workloads, and to proceed with cloud migration for the workloads identified by our analysis.