A Timely Plan for Healthcare Data Center Consolidation
Spruce was contracted by a state’s office of Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide an assessment of the IT system environment, infrastructure, and applications portfolio of one of their key programs, which administers the state’s fund supporting healthcare for uninsured and underinsured individuals. The program office was planning for major changes to their IT department and wanted an overview of their existing systems.
When the state decided to consolidate all their individual agency datacenters into one state-of-the-art centralized datacenter, their HHS team contracted Spruce to assist with the transition. Consequently, Spruce was asked to perform several key actions to guide the program office through the process.
First, Spruce was tasked with determining the feasibility and potential for migrating each individual system to the new centralized datacenter. The office had been running several legacy applications as well as tools that did not conform to state technology standards. Spruce assessed each entity on its migration potential, its potential to be upgraded to meet state standards, and whether it could be replaced by a comparable compliant program or needed to be decommissioned entirely. Spruce provided in-depth recommendations on the aforementioned factors to assist the program office in critical decision-making opportunities.
Next, Spruce was asked to develop an infrastructure rationalization plan for the client. The goal of this part of the project was to lower overall service hosting costs through the reduction of the agency’s collective datacenter footprint. In order to do this, Spruce individually evaluated the footprint of each legacy application in relation to the expanded hosting potential of the new centralized datacenter component architecture. When these evaluations were made, Spruce began creating a comprehensive plan to migrate the salvageable legacy technologies and the compliant current technologies into the new centralized database.
Spruce fulfilled all requests made by the client as they completed the task of evaluating and migrating the existing technology to the new datacenter. Spruce worked with the state to develop a phased plan which involved initially migrating the program office’s environment to an interim host site while optimizing compatibility with the new datacenter. The agency implemented the recommendations made by Spruce and initiated the process of moving the former system environment onto the new centralized managed platform.
Challenge
