For Sharp HealthCare, cloud technology brings autonomy
Sharp HealthCare is working on a multi-tiered, hybrid cloud deployment that offers a little bit of everything: AWS infrastructure, a private cloud, hundreds of applications, and an electronic health record system migration.
The project marks the San Diego-based health system’s first foray into public cloud infrastructure. Key drivers for healthcare’s cloud technology initiative include the potential for cost savings, the ability to automate IT resources and a faster path to technology adoption, said Thomas Gorrie, director of core technologies at Sharp.
“We were using SaaS services, but we realized we really needed to look at the commercial cloud [platforms]” he said. “We had no experience at all.”
Sharp hired Chicago-based IT services provider Ahead to lead its cloud project, which began about 18 months ago. In the first phase of this effort, Ahead reviewed Sharp’s application portfolio, considered migration options, and developed an end-state model for what running that portfolio would look like in the cloud.
The aim of the project is to provide the technical foundations of a hybrid cloud. However, a parallel thrust is to preserve Sharp’s IT autonomy. For example, the healthcare system’s cloud architecture is designed to prevent vendor lock-in, which prevents customers from offloading workloads to alternative cloud providers. In addition, Sharp places emphasis on knowledge transfer in its relationship with Ahead in order to avoid dependence on the service provider. To this end, Ahead coaches the health system’s IT team in setting up and managing a cloud environment.
“[Ahead] “I could have built it and operated it for us if we had wanted to,” Gorrie said. “But that’s not how we do it. We worked with their experts to basically teach ourselves to feed ourselves.”
Sharp HealthCare’s hybrid cloud aims to provide cost, AI adoption and self-management benefits.
Build for multiple clouds and self-management
Sharp’s cloud deployment is designed to support multiple cloud providers. Ahead worked with Sharp to design a cloud network that leverages Megaport’s Network-as-a-Service offering to connect the health system’s public cloud provider, AWS, to its private cloud, based on Cisco Unified Computing System hardware and a VMware hypervisor. Megaport’s service supports multiple cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
“We don’t want to be dependent on a particular public cloud provider,” Gorrie said.
With the cloud network in place, Ahead began ongoing training of Sharp’s IT team to build an AWS environment. A workshop will cover best practices for an AWS landing zone that provides a launching pad for deploying workloads and applications to the AWS cloud. Other workshop topics include best practices for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and the basics of GitHub Actions and Hashicorp’s Terraform.
GitHub Actions, a CI/CD platform, allows users to create workflows for building, testing, and deploying software. TerraForm automates cloud tasks such as infrastructure provisioning and orchestration.
The workshops include consultant-led briefings on each topic and practical scenarios that reinforce the concepts, Gorrie said. In the case of Terraform fundamentals, Ahead provided pre-built Terraform modules to help IT staff quickly apply newly learned concepts in Sharp’s AWS environment, he added. Sharp is now extending its Terraform knowledge, techniques and tools to the private cloud so that operations can be unified across the hybrid setup, Gorrie said.
Another third party, which Gorrie did not identify, created and now operates an AWS environment for Sharp’s data analysts and web teams. But once Sharp’s cloud-trained staff builds a self-managed AWS environment, they assume the responsibility of the provider. Gorrie said Sharp will be able to manage the cloud itself for about half the cost of outsourcing the management tasks. This transition is scheduled to be completed by February 1, 2025.
Sorting apps, faster time to value
In the coming months, Sharp will work with Ahead to streamline its application portfolio. The organizations will evaluate the apps and decide whether a particular system should be migrated to a public cloud, managed in Sharp’s private cloud, replaced with a SaaS application or decommissioned, Gorrie said.
We don’t want to be dependent on a specific public cloud provider.
Thomas GorrieDirector of Core Technologies, Sharp Healthcare
Sharp has about 400 applications. The Health system has already migrated many of the largest to SaaS or remote hosting providers. One example is Sharp’s migration of electronic medical records from a Cerner system to a remotely hosted Epic EMR deployment, which went live in March. Ahead played a role in this aspect of the project, setting up AWS to extract data from the Epic database, move it into an AWS account, and then load it into a Snowflake data warehouse for analysis.
But there are many applications that organizations still need to clarify.
“We have a handful of pretty significant applications that are potential candidates for commercial cloud,” Gorrie said. “And then we have quite a few – on the order of 200 applications – that are quite small. And there will be the difficult work. Many of these applications are not suitable for moving to the commercial cloud.”
Such applications can be migrated, but only if the infrastructure is duplicated in a private or public cloud, which Gorrie said becomes expensive.
As the rationalization process continues, Sharp will look for ways to optimize cloud usage to reduce costs.
“Our overall goal is to make the commercial cloud cost-neutral,” Gorrie said. “And then we hope to be able to demonstrate cost reductions as we move forward.”
In addition to reducing costs, another benefit of the cloud is the time to value, Gorrie said. He noted that new technologies such as AI are more accessible via the cloud. In one case, Sharp deployed its own version of ChatGPT on AWS. The rollout took approximately 60 days from concept to production.
“The only way to deliver it was through cloud services,” Gorrie said.
John Moore is a TechTarget Editorial writer covering the role of the CIO, business trends, and the IT services industry.