Amazon Web Services Helps 3M HIS by Reducing Its Server-Provisioning Process Time to Minutes

In the world of technological development and where data is a critical part of every business operation, organizations need a solution to defend it to deliver better and efficient development pipelines. 3M HIS, the world's largest providers of software for the healthcare industry required a solution to create and implement innovative new healthcare software for its customers.

3M HIS: Background

3M Health Information Systems (HIS), a division of the global science company 3M, provides software solutions that focus on advancing the healthcare industry. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, the company helps providers, payers, and government agencies anticipate and navigate the changing healthcare landscape. It also provides strategic services and solutions for healthcare performance measurement, management, and analysis that assist its clients to reduce costs, improve performance, and raise the quality of care by moving from volume-based to value-based healthcare.

The Business Challenge 

Previously, 3M HIS relied on multiple on-premises IT centers and collocated environments to support its software solutions. However, this approach led to major challenges. For the years ago, the company decided to decrease its IT operational overhead where it could focus more intently on its core business – healthcare analytics. Doing so, the company transitioned applications from its many on-premises IT centers and collocated environments into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Following this transition, 3M HIS transformed its application-lifecycle management from a traditional waterfall approach to an agile methodology, with the goal of enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). But even as the company's initial steps toward CI/CD showed promise, there were new challenges to overcome.

Therefore, 3M HIS needed a solution that could help it eliminate the bottleneck created by manual provisioning of development pipelines while adhering to crucial governance and control requirements. Also, the company wanted to lay the foundation necessary to eliminate barriers needed to increase the speed of innovation.

The Solution: 3M HIS Finds Amazon Web Services 

3M Health Information Systems determined that moving to the cloud is the best way to address its challenges. To ease these challenges and for assistance with this project, 3M HIS found AWS to have the best infrastructure and performance to meet its needs. After choosing AWS, the company began migrating several important applications to the AWS Cloud. The organization worked closely with AWS Professional Services that offered the expert architecture and configuration guidance required to expedite the migration.

The company turned to an AWS Partner Network (APN) member designated as a Premier Consulting Partner and an AWS Public Sector Partner. By tapping APN and gaining the advantage of it provided 3M HIS wity the opportunity to find a company specializes in and has a strong track record to assist its customers with DevOps transformation and CI/CD on AWS.

By leveraging AWS Service Catalog, the company builds, manages, and governs AWS CloudFormation templates that provision development pipelines in just a few clicks. These pipelines are preconfigured for specific teams and purposes, in compliance with the organization's information security policies.

The Outcome

By running its applications on AWS and adding AWS Service Catalog to its CI/CD platform, 3M HIS lessened bottlenecks, bolstered compliance with its governance and control requirements, and took a big step toward fully automated pipeline provisioning. Now, the company can easily scale up or down without needing to acquire and provision servers' months in advance. The company can have a new pipeline ready in 10 minutes, in place of requiring days to build it manually by using AWS.

Along with reducing provisioning time from days to 10 minutes, 3M HIS is able to allow:

•   AWS CloudFormation templates to create consistent, compliant pipelines

•   Faster provisioning accelerates customer feedback loops and time to market