Humanex Ventures

Humanex Ventures is a human resource consulting company based in Lincoln, Nebraska that helps businesses architect excellence in talent, culture, and teams. Having a specialized focus in education, athletics, and business & community, Humanex marries technology and research to help organizations across the country master their people needs.

The Challenge

Humanex served their partners through a Java-based software platform. They had two main drivers to move to the cloud:

>  Their entire technology stack was approaching support end of life
>  They did not have the source code of their current software solution

With end of support upon them, Humanex was operating on a system that lacked redundancy, scalability, and reliability. Also, with no source code, further support and enhancements were costly and time-consuming, taking their technical staff away from impactful work for their customers. With the future in mind, Humanex knew it was time to move to the cloud: specifically, AWS.

The Solution

Our engagement started with a two-day discovery session at Humanex’s headquarters in Nebraska. During this session we performed a deep dive to understand their current application’s capabilities, documented their systems, and educated their staff on what their feature set could look like in AWS. Virtual sessions continued post-workshop to prioritize the features and design of their new application. Finally, we met once more at our home office in Rochester, NY to solidify the solution.

After months of development, our teams were able to create an entirely new cloud-native platform living in AWS. Humanex’s code deployment was built with a modern DevOps framework using AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CloudFormation, and the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM). Their single-page application is now served up through Amazon CloudFront and hosted in S3 for performance and efficiency. Calls into their API are served up by Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, and backend asynchronous processes utilize Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), all for greater efficiency. Their database leverages Amazon Aurora Serverless, and the entire application possesses easy monitoring and visibility through Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray performance metrics. Lastly, each environment is contained within its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for heightened security.

The Results

Through our partnership, Humanex now has a completely rejuvenated, agile application powered by AWS. Their solution exemplifies the pillars of AWS’ Well-Architected Framework: secure, high performing, operationally efficient, resilient, and cost optimized. They have a highly scalable, cost effective solution that they can continue to build upon with significantly lower operational overhead. This lowered overhead reduces time to market, helping Humanex to stay ahead of their competition. With serverless computing as the backbone to their application, infrastructure management is simplified and streamlined so Humanex’s technical team can focus on implementing features that serve their customers.

Check out our video on Humanex Ventures

Roji Health Intelligence

Roji Health Intelligence is a small technology company based in Chicago, IL that targets the healthcare industry. Their software platform helps providers see their quality and costs in a unique way, which allows patients to receive the right care at the right time. Healthcare organizations are realigning services and operations to deliver Value-Based Care. To get there, providers need robust information about cost and outcomes to make wise strategic and financial decisions. Roji creates pioneering, technology-based solutions and services for these organizations to achieve just that. They help health care systems, ACOs, medical groups, and health systems to grow and prosper with ACOs, Direct Contracting, Primary Care First and other Medicare and commercial Value-Based Care models.

The Challenge

Roji had an opportunity to transform their business by moving to the cloud. They initially built their environment using on-premise physical servers. Although they were able to serve the majority of their customer base, their business was growing at a rapid rate, and they needed the ability to scale quickly, efficiently, and securely in the cloud. Security was a major focus for Roji, as they needed to protect their patient data and meet HIPPA compliance standards. In addition to scalability and security, Roji saw the potential costly capital expenditures on the horizon if they continued to use their on-premise IT infrastructure. Most of their physical servers and equipment were going end of life, and would have required a large financial investment to purchase newer pieces of hardware in addition to the migration of their workloads to the new hardware.

The Solution

After months of preparation and planning, we were able to help Roji through their migration and utilize the power of the cloud. The engagement started with a Migration Readiness Assessment, where we utilized a migration tool to crawl the customer’s current on-premise environment and create a total cost of ownership (TCO) for their future cloud costs. Once validated, our team started planning for Roji’s full migration. The migration was made seamless with the help from CloudEndure, a highly-automated tool that simplifies, expedites, and reduces the cost of migrating applications to AWS Cloud. With CloudEndure, our team was able to set up agents and cutover to the customer’s cloud environment in an instant. We performed a domain health audit on the customers domain controllers and migrated them over to their AWS environment as well. After the migration was complete, our team provided extended support to the Roji team to ensure the migration and handoff was as smooth as possible for their technical team and their customers.

The Result

With a helping hand from our Migration team, Roji is now set up for success within AWS. They moved from an on-prem solution that could not scale to their business needs to a cohesive cloud solution that will help them deliver a greater experience to their customers. Large capital expenditures and downtime are worries of the past with pay-as-you-go compute resources spread across multiple availability zones. Roji can effortlessly protect their customer data through their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), meet HIPAA compliance requirements, and have the ability to meet other compliance standards like HITRUST, that will attract more customers.

Check out our video on Roji Health Intelligence

myDigitalOffice

myDigitalOffice is a technology company that’s disrupting the hospitality industry with their #1 rated hotel accounting and finance software. Their modern information management software, allows customers to visualize their data and create action from it. To continue their innovation, they needed to go all in on the Cloud and migrate their entire infrastructure to their new 2.0 platform, built on AWS.

The Challenge

myDigitalOffice was facing two major issues that needed to be resolved immediately. The first issue was that they were overspending by being extremely over provisioned. The second issue was that they were on a strict timeline to migrate their on-premises servers out of the IBM datacenter before it closed permanently. With deadlines looming, they knew they needed to find a way to migrate quickly and reduce their spend. They already had part of their infrastructure in AWS but did not feel they had the resources to successfully migrate and support any additional workloads in the Cloud. That’s when they turned to Innovative.

The Solution

myDigitalOffice’s software enables their customers to organize information in meaningful and actionable snapshots with instant reporting across properties and systems. We stepped in and quickly understood myDigitalOffice’s situation and built a plan that will meet all their immediate needs and set them up for future growth. The first step of this engagement was to analyze and document their current on-premises infrastructure within IBM. The deliverable was a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) for their remaining workloads. With the MRA complete, we utilized CloudEndure to migrate everything to their existing account on AWS. This AWS offering provided a low cost, scalable, and highly reliable infrastructure platform that helped manage variable costs and replace high upfront infrastructure investments. It allowed us to create a copy of their existing servers without the need to rebuild these instances within AWS.

Due to the hospitality industry being decimated by COVID-19, myDigitalOffice was hesitant to come up with the upfront costs typically associated with migrations. We were able to identify an AWS funding program that drastically reduce their investment, allowing them to stay under their operating budget.

The Result

Utilizing CloudEndure, we were able to complete the migration project within the deadline set by their IBM Datacenter. With myDigitalOffice now being a cloud-first company, they can easily right size their entire infrastructure to the correct specifications without the need to over provision for the future, saving them thousands of dollars a year. It also allows them to achieve increased reliability and scalability without the large upfront cost.

Quarem

Quarem’s industry leading lease management software comes from technology and people working together.

The Challenge

Quarem’s web application architecture included a front-end web server which was directly accessible over the Internet. Due to this being a single webserver, they were leaving a business-critical application open to potential issues. The fact that the application was on a single web server, the likelihood for downtime, due to a server issue, was very high. The server environment was not easily scalable to meeting the growing business needs. There was also a possibility that the server could have been over-exposed through configuration mistakes. For all of these reasons, Quarem knew it needed a change.

The Solution

Quarem, with the help of AWS and Innovative Solutions, created an EC2 Auto-Scaling Group for the webserver and launched at least two servers in multiple availability zones. An Application Load Balancer was set up to direct traffic to the Auto-Scaling Group and to terminate SSL traffic. Quarem migrated their DNS to Route53, to be able to send their traffic to the load balancer in the zone apex record. With these changes, Quarem was able to build a more secure and scalable environment both internally and externally for their customers

Quality in Real Time (QIRT)

For a business that serves the health care market, like QIRT, scale, reliability, and compliance all matter.

The Challenge

QIRT’s homegrown business application system had worked well for years. But by 2012, it could no longer meet all the needs of their fast-expanding enterprise. As the company grew and the industry they served was evolving, they began to struggle to expand in the directions they needed for customers.

  • Performance and reliability issues cropped
  • Compliance requirements were increasing
  • User volume was exploding year over year
  • Can’t keep up with changing business needs
The Solution

Innovative Solutions reviewed QIRT’s existing system to determine the right direction to migrate toward as they evolved into a full-fledged Quality Cycle Management organization. The IS team came back with a bold recommendation: for QIRT to start from scratch, rewriting every piece of their application. It would be the most ambitious development project QIRT had ever considered, and one that would add scalability, flexibility, and competitive advantages to their core offering. Innovative went on to create a custom SaaS, QIRT Advantage, built on AWS so that it could serve many different types of users. AWS hosting means every end user can communicate securely across the system in an environment that meets rigorous requirements such as PHI, HIPPA compliance and the SOC2 certification. QIRT Advantage is easy for professionals in these varied fields to adapt to. Cloud-based, mobile access across devices also gives QIRT the freedom to hire the best talent, no matter where they live. And AWS services bring it all together

Monroe Wheelchair

How Monroe Wheelchair used AWS to protect their business from outages and direct resources more efficiently.

For Monroe Wheelchair, 2017 turned out to be a pivotal year for their IT infrastructure. When the year began, they were facing end-of-life hardware, gaps in their systems from backup to security, a mountain of office paperwork, and vulnerabilities they hadn’t yet imagined. By the end of the year, they had an AWS-based solution that included Amazon WorkSpaces and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that helped them protect their business from outages, lost productivity from unexpected downtime, costly over-provisioned infrastructure, and service disruptions that cut into their revenue.

The Challenge

A business specializing in creating better lives for people with disabilities, Monroe Wheelchair of Rochester, N.Y., provides complex rehab and mobility solutions across New York State. Much of the company’s business centers on rehabilitation, so their team is frequently on the road providing critical maintenance for wheelchairs and other equipment people rely on. By the end of 2016, the company realized they’d outgrown the capabilities of their longtime IT service provider. They found they needed more bandwidth and strategic thinking for IT and turned to Innovative Solutions in early 2017.

Soon after the relationship with Innovative began, the issue of Business Continuity became an urgent consideration when a Monroe Wheelchair main office lost power during windstorm, knocking them offline for days. All of their servers were in their Rochester headquarters and they couldn’t use their computers or phones, so their other locations couldn’t operate either. The cost was steep: severe service disruptions, employee downtime, and lost revenue.

It became clear that Monroe Wheelchair’s on-premises infrastructure was end-of-life and no longer supported. It could not meet the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) expectations of Monroe Wheelchair. They needed a way for users across the organization to have reliable access to their IT infrastructure and sensitive PHI data, even in the case of a site failure. So, while we were preparing to recommend a solution to replace the customer’s hardware as it neared its end of life and losing its warranty, our team also made Business Continuity a priority to help the company mitigate the risk of power loss.

The Solution

After looking over the options and the multi-year cost-of-ownership models the Innovative team put together, Monroe Wheelchair quickly knew the direction that was right for them, and that solution was built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based service that would enable a fully managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service solution. With AWS, the company would have a virtual, cloud-based environment so their users could access documents, applications, and resources—anywhere, anytime. Two key components from AWS came into play:

Amazon WorkSpaces
This Desktop-as-a-Service program lets users connect to their employer’s entire IT infrastructure from any computer with a browser, because the hardware, storage, and memory are all hosted in the cloud. It offers users the secure mobility of working from anywhere, decreased need for troubleshooting, and rapid deployment.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
This AWS cloud-native server enables Monroe Wheelchair to scale up or scale in the most cost-effective way. For instance, if they don’t need server capacity and storage in one area, they can reduce their usage, while scaling up to use software they’re implementing in another area. They’re never over-provisioned, which means they’re never have to pay for services they don’t use.

Since Monroe Wheelchair migrated their entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company runs its major line of business applications in EC2 and the users’ desktops in Amazon WorkSpaces. Users are able to work remotely without a dependency on any of their offices or weather. Their environment is backed up automatically. By using AWS, Monroe Wheelchair is able to redeploy the infrastructure to another region in the case of a major failure.

Fieldtex Products, Inc.

Fieldtex is a private family owned company that operates out of a 55,000 sq.ft. facility in Rochester, NY and employs over 190 people.

It was founded in 1973 and is made up of three divisions:

Division 1: Fieldtex Cases – Their contract manufacturing division that produces soft sided carrying cases for portable electronic equipment for medical and military markets, wearable medical and military garments, and other textile innovations.

Division 2: Fieldtex Medical – Their First Aid Supplies division, distributes stock First Aid Kits, custom First Aid Kits, and First Aid supplies to emergency medical corps., schools, cities, towns, youth team sports leagues and the general safety marketplace.

Division 3: OTC Benefits Solutions – Works with Health Plans and other organizations to offer Supplemental Over the Counter Benefit Programs to members of Medicare Advantage Health Plans.

The Challenge

Fieldtex had multiple applications hosted with a relatively expensive offsite provider. As part of a tech refresh most applications were migrated to new hardware and their public facing .com website was the only application being hosted on two large legacy servers that were significantly over-provisioned (two 16×64 servers). Source control was not in place and there was no formal release process.

The Solution

Innovative proposed migrating their .com website to AWS, leveraging appropriately provisioned Amazon EC2 instances in AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. AWS CodeCommit allowed for the website’s code to be to be version controlled. AWS CodePipeline was leveraged to create application packages that could be deployed to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. Amazon Aurora Serverless was used to minimize infrastructure costs and operational overhead while providing flexibility in the case of unexpected bursts of traffic. Amazon SES is used to send email.

Innovative also created an integration with Office 365 APIs to push notifications to Microsoft Teams whenever a manual approval is needed. This was accomplished by creating an Amazon SNS topic for manual approval steps that triggers an AWS Lambda function that pushes to Office 365.

Canandaigua Medical Group

Canandaigua Medical Group migrates entire infrastructure to AWS using Server Migration Service (SMS).

The Challenge

Canandaigua Medical Group was acquired by Thompson Health. With this acquisition came a new building slated to open in early 2019, and their servers were approaching the end of their life. Since the acquisition, the technology systems were being merged, but there was a need to keep the legacy workloads around for a little bit longer. Canandaigua Medical Group and Thompson Health wanted to avoid buying equipment that would not be used for its full lifecycle.

The Solution

Canandaigua Medical Group migrated their entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company now runs their legacy systems in EC2 and the users’ desktops in Amazon WorkSpaces. The servers were migrated before their deadline using Server Migration Service. By using AWS, Canandaigua Medical Group is able to pay just for what they use and can scale up or down, depending on business needs

Van Hook Services

Van Hook Services migrates aging infrastructure to Amazon Web Services using Server Migration Service (SMS).

The Challenge

Van Hook Service had aging infrastructure that was due for replacement. Since their last refresh, many of their systems, including Genesis were being accessed by their growing remote workforce. Van Hook relies on several applications for their remote technicians to access and can’t rely on their on-premise servers or internet connection. Van Hook wanted a solution that is more reliable and can scale to their ever-changing business needs.

The Solution

Van Hook migrated their entire infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), as their servers’ warranties were expiring. The servers were migrated using Server Migration Service. The company now runs their developed application, Genesis, on EC2, and some of the users’ desktops in Amazon WorkSpaces. During the migration, they were also able to implement a second environment for staging development changes to Genesis. AWS allows them to continue to iterate on their application and start developing with cloud native technologies. By using AWS, Van Hook is able to pay just for what they use and can scale up or down, depending on business needs.

Campus CMG

Campus CMG reduces downtime and increases productivity with Amazon Workspaces and AWS

The Challenge

Campus CMG systems were hosted in a managed datacenter, which they were quickly outgrowing. They were using Remote Desktop Services for all their users, and found that the shared environment would experience problems when one user was consuming most of the resources. Campus CMG would have to reach out to their IT vendor to reboot their environment before they could get to work. They needed a solution that would allow them to access their desktops with a consistent experience, and not have the performance impact when users are busy.

The Solution

Campus CMG migrated their entire infrastructure from their collocation environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company now runs their major line of business applications in EC2, and their users’ desktops in Amazon Workspaces. The users are able to work remotely by using the WorkSpaces client or an HTML5 web browser. They no longer have to reboot a server and disrupt all the users if a single person is having a problem.

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