House of Diagnostics Enhances User Experience Through Migration to AWS
A changing lifestyle, and steady rise in awareness of preventive health have fuelled the growth of the diagnostic industry in India to US$9 billion. The opportunity for growth is tremendous, especially when it comes to expanding in under-penetrated areas and providing high-end diagnostic solutions that are not yet available in India.
Players like House of Diagnostics are driving this growth story by bringing in newer and more personalised preventive healthcare tests to India. With a vision to introduce the latest medical technologies to India, HoD has focused all its goals towards providing quality and reliable diagnostic services at an affordable cost.
www.houseofdiagnostics.com
01. The Growth of Diagnostics Through Technology
HoD is now working on expanding its horizons both domestically and globally, to help reach out to more people with its offerings. Technology is a crucial link between HoD and its customers, covering a broad range of services such as finding different kinds of diagnostic tests, scheduling appointments, recording and maintaining reports and health records, booking home collections, and more. A shifting consumer behaviour towards convenience and quality in getting these services means that they have to become a service provider who can ensure accurate results with a faster turn-around time at a competitive price.
These changing dynamics of the industry made it paramount for HoD to look beyond the usual, reinvent their strategies to ensure sustainability of their business, and offer world class digital experience to their customers.
02. The Goals and Challenges
As one of the leading diagnostic centres in the country, House of Diagnostics is going through a major growth phase, evolving to a global centre with multiple product offerings. The company’s growth is constantly being driven by the increase in number of customers, expanding footprint, and an aggressive ramp up of its product portfolio.
HoD wanted to overcome challenges being faced by their business-critical infrastructure, running on-premise on Microsoft Windows Server build on .Net framework and Microsoft SQL database. This environment was supporting their digital journey, including website and mobile application where thousands of customers book tests, make payments, and access test reports, on a daily basis. Both the website and the app are important, not just to support the overall organization, but also to increase HoD’s brand awareness by approaching maximum number of customers.
However, HoD’s website and applications were facing frequent downtimes, which hampered efficient customer service. This was especially difficult during peak times, like early mornings and evening, where a majority of its customers would try to access the website or the app to book tests or to download their reports. A sudden increase in customer load would bring down the entire server, which meant loss of crucial business time, and valuable customers.
Downtime wasn’t the only issue for the company. As a healthcare organization, HoD plays an active role in guarding sensitive customer health information. With their current level of customer growth, it was important for them to align security and scalability in their business-critical infrastructure to support their applications effectively. They were keen to look for an environment that helps them prevent and detect the security threats and offers automation to respond and remediate quickly. HoD’s existing environment also had multiple application components running on the same server, thus making it time consuming to troubleshoot and scale the architecture
03. Umbrella Infocare & AWS To The Rescue
House of Diagnostics evaluated multiple vendors such as Azure and Google, before zeroing down on AWS Cloud as a platform to meet their growth needs. As a reliable AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Umbrella Infocare proposed a solution that was most suitable to tackle the challenges of a growing organization like HoD. Umbrella helped HoD to migrate their on-premise infrastructure, and introduced key architectural components such as auto-scaling to handle peak loads, AWS multi-AZ architecture to address failures, and a host of other features such as advanced application and database monitoring and easy manageability. This helped HoD ultimately benefit from an enhanced customer experience for greater business impact.
04.The Execution
Instead of resorting to the common ‘Lift and Shift’ strategy, Umbrella helped HoD to re-architect the application by decoupling the application into multi-tier architecture with a separate web, application and database layer for improved performance, enhanced security and scalability of their architecture.
Further deployed AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Security Group, and NACL, which provided a platform to secure the AWS Environment using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for its application, database, and supporting servers.
Moreover, separate subnets were configured for each layer for network-level isolation and Umbrella deployed the application in layered architecture with Autoscaling, which would provide application scalability in the event of higher load for diagnostic tests or report downloads. All infrastructure was deployed using AWS CloudFormation to achieve automation of deployment. AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is configured with Amazon CloudFront CDN, while ALB (Application Load Balancer) was used to route the traffic to private subnet’s servers over multi-availability zones of AWS for higher availability, and achieve near DR deployment
05. Success Story
Umbrella Infocare successfully migrated HoD’s on-premise infrastructure to AWS Cloud, thus effectively and reliably modernizing its environment to suit the growing needs of the organization.
Praising the team at Umbrella Infocare, House of Diagnostics said, “The team was quick at zeroing down on the issue, and then architecting a solution that met our needs to a T. They helped us lower costs, made our business environment more stable and secure, and helped us offer improved customer experience, owing to a much faster turnaround time of service delivery. Constant upgradation and introduction of the latest technology in diagnostics has always been our aim, and I am glad we found a partner with such deep knowledge of crucial tech aspects that help manage an online business effectively.”
