Healthcare groups are, increasingly, implementing cloud-based systems to meet their IT requirements, but while there are multiple reasons for moving applications, infrastructure and data center operations to the cloud, the high cloud costs make it an unattractive possibility. Many healthcare groups purchase AWS EC2 instances for to implement this on their servers. While this particular platform meets their requirements, the prohibitive cost of running AWS EC2 instances – or similar instances from other IT suppliers – is leading to many healthcare groups to downsizing their cloud migration plans. The cost of running AWS EC2 instances can be very high. Tristar Medical Group, the biggest privately-owned healthcare supplier located in Australia, runs help centers across the country, spread across many time zones. These clinics require access to servers 24 hours a day and cloud instances were left operating 24/7. Tristar soon discovered that this particular strategy was proving prohibitively costly. While the requirements of its clinics were being met, the expense its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution was far too high.
The rising OpEx costs led to Tristar reducing 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,” stated Tristar CTO Dewald Botha. Most groups adapt too many cloud resources and do not rightsize resources for their specific requirements. Cloud instances are operating 24/7 at a significant cost, when a large percentage of the time those resources are not being employed. The most efficient solution is to schedule resources and turn off instances when they are not needed and turn them back on at a time that they are required. Scheduling alone means that cloud users can make major savings and minmize their cloud bills, although complex hybrid cloud environments require an automated scheduling package.
Tristar identified the simplest solution as an application that could be used to time instances and optimize cloud costs and searched for an effective cloud cost management package. Many solutions were tested, and while all provided the chance to eliminate inefficiencies and schedule resources, the most flexible and easy to use solution that achieved the most savings was supplied by ParkMyCloud. After signing up for the free trial, Tristar found it was able to almost at once reduce its AWS costs by between 40%-60%, depending on its operational logistical requirements.
With costs lessened and spending optimized, Tristar has been able to move along with cloud migration and has now transferred many of its current datacenter instances to AWS. Once that process is finished, Tristar thinks it will be able to save almost $20,000 a month on cloud costs – $240,000 per annum.
