Healthcare groups are, more and more, using the cloud to meet their IT requirements, but while there are many benefits to be had from moving applications, infrastructure and data center operations to the cloud, managing cloud costs remains a major Obstacle.
Many healthcare groups opt AWS EC2 instances for their servers. While the platform meets their requirements, the high cost of running AWS EC2 instances – or equivalent instances from other suppliers – is forcing many healthcare groupss to scale back their cloud migration plans.
The cost of running AWS EC2 instances can be massive. Tristar Medical Group, the largest privately-owned healthcare supplier in Australia, runs centers across the country, spread across multiple time zones. Its clinics require access to servers around the clock and cloud instances were left running 24/7.
Tristar soon found that its strategy was proving prohibitively costly. While the requirements of its clinics were being fulfilled, the cost of its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution was unsustainable.
The rising OpEx costs led to Tristar downscaling its instances and servers. “This led us to two conclusions. Either spend a large amount of capital upfront to increase the efficiency of our VDI solution, or automate and fine-tune our AWS servers to maximize output,” commented Tristar CTO Dewald Botha.
Most groups overprovision cloud resources and do not rightsize resources for their requirement. Cloud instances are run 24/7 at a significant cost, when a large percentage of the time those resources are not being used.
The easiest solution is to schedule resources and switch off instances when they are not needed and turn them back on when they are required. Scheduling alone permit cloud users to make major savings and minmize their monthly cloud bills, although complex hybrid cloud environments require an automated scheduling solution.
Tristar determined the simplest solution was to identify an application that could be used to time instances and optimize cloud costs and searched for an effective cloud cost management solution.
Many solutions were trialed, and while all provided the opportunity to eliminate inefficiencies and schedule resources, the most flexible and straightforward to use solution that achieved the greatest savings was supplied by ParkMyCloud. After registering for the free trial, Tristar found it was able to almost instantly reduce its AWS costs by between 40%-60%, depending on its operational requirements.
With costs cut and spending optimized, Tristar has been able to speed up cloud migration and has now shifted many of its current datacenter instances to AWS. By the time that process is finished, Tristar thinks it will be able to save around $20,000 a month on cloud costs – $240,000 annually.
