A story with Hackensack Meridian Health

The first cloud service was launched 15 years ago. Since then, companies have moved to the cloud for its global infrastructure, scalability, agility, resiliency, elasticity, and security as well as its reduction in capital expenditures. Over the years, I’ve helped many successful cloud migrations and gained a lot of valuable experience and insights. However, not every journey to the cloud is smooth. Without expertise and experience, many cloud migrations fail to meet the goals and expectations companies hope to realize.

How do enterprises march a successful and enriching cloud journey? Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) recently took on the challenge and has the answer.

HMH is New Jersey’s largest, most comprehensive and integrated health network. In the beginning of 2021, HMH selected Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) as its new home in the cloud for infrastructure and applications. However, their cloud path was not at all straightforward. The initial partner relationship did not provide the appropriate forward progress, and HMH was challenged for several months looking for the expertise and skills they needed – until May of 2021, when they were introduced to Dito, a Google partner specializing in GCP infrastructure and security. With Dito, HMH’s cloud journey accelerated.

Dito has decades of experience in designing well-architected cloud foundations and extensive hands-on experience in building Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules. Dito helped HMH march to the cloud in three phases.

Phase 1
In the first phase, Dito conducted numerous workshops with HMH’s lines of business, IT infrastructure, and security teams to thoroughly discover and understand their business use cases, operation environment, key performance indexes, security and compliance requirements and cost implications. This phase solidified a strong foundation for the whole project.

Phase 2
In the second phase, Dito developed a well-architected GCP infrastructure and security foundation that met the healthcare giant’s specific business needs and requirements: operation excellency, performance optimization, structure resiliency, security and cost reduction. As a healthcare company, regulatory compliance and proper security was paramount. A significant amount of detail and planning went into this design phase.

Phase 3
In the third phase, the Dito team worked side-by-side with HMH’s cloud team to lay down a well-tested GCP foundation using IaC CI/CD pipelines and Terraform modules. For each cloud service, they developed TerraForm modules. For each application deployment, they leveraged the CI/CD pipeline. These modules and pipelines established the operational standard for consistent deployments, turning the design blueprints into versioned operational infrastructure and applications.

From discovery to design to deployment, from blueprints to modules to pipelines, Dito’s expertise and experiences made a huge difference. HMH has successfully landed and is enjoying the benefits of Google Cloud. Their answer for a successful cloud journey is: finding the right partner – let the professionals do their job.