Professional Cloud ArchitectDemo

Company overview –

EHR Healthcare is a leading provider of electronic health record software to the medical industry. It provides its software as a service to multinational medical offices, hospitals, and insurance providers.

Solution concept –

Due to rapid changes in the healthcare and insurance industry, EHR Healthcare's business has grown exponentially year over year. It needs to scale its environment, adapt its disaster-recovery plan, and roll out new continuous-deployment capabilities to update software quickly. Google Cloud was selected to replace its current colocation facilities.

Existing technical environment –

EHR's software is currently hosted in multiple colocation facilities. The lease on one data center is about to expire.

Customer-facing applications are web-based, and many have recently been containerized to run on a group of Kubernetes clusters. Data is stored in a mixture of relational and NoSQL databases (MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, and MongoDB).

EHR hosts several legacy file- and API-based integrations with insurance providers on-premises. These systems are scheduled to be replaced over the next several years. There is no plan to upgrade or move these systems at this time.

Users are managed through Microsoft Active Directory. Monitoring is currently performed via various open-source tools. Alerts are sent by email and are often ignored.

Business requirements –

• Onboard new insurance providers as quickly as possible.
• Provide a minimum 99.9% availability for all customer-facing systems.
• Provide centralized visibility and proactive action on system performance and usage.
• Increase the ability to provide insights into healthcare trends.
• Reduce latency to all customers.
• Maintain regulatory compliance.
• Decrease infrastructure-administration costs.
• Make predictions and generate reports on industry trends based on provider data.

Technical requirements –

• Maintain legacy interfaces to insurance providers with connectivity to both on-premises systems and cloud providers.
• Provide a consistent way to manage container-based customer-facing applications.
• Provide a secure, high-performance connection between on-premises systems and Google Cloud.
• Provide consistent logging, log retention, monitoring, and alerting capabilities.
• Maintain and manage multiple container-based environments.
• Dynamically scale and provision new environments.
• Create interfaces to ingest and process data from new providers.

Executive statement –

Our on-premises strategy has worked for years but has required a major investment of time and money in training our team on distinctly different systems, managing similar but separate environments, and responding to outages. Many of these outages have resulted from misconfigured systems, inadequate capacity to manage traffic spikes, and inconsistent monitoring practices. We want to use Google Cloud to leverage a scalable, resilient platform that can span multiple environments seamlessly and provide a consistent, stable user experience that positions us for future growth.

For this question, refer to the EHR Healthcare case study. Due to growing partnerships with new insurance providers, EHR Healthcare needs a solution to streamline creation of secure Google Cloud environments for each provider. You must automate the provisioning and management of these secure environments, ensure each provider environment is consistently configured and managed, and provide a consistent user experience across all providers. What should you do?