How Medi-Map plotted global growth in Microsoft Azure

A little guidance goes a long way

Medi-Map invited Leaven, CCL’s cloud transformation services business unit, to help navigate the company’s continued transition to Microsoft Azure, implement DevOps best practices, and upskill its software development team.

Work kicked off with Leaven’s Cloud Architecture Review – an audit of Medi-Map’s existing Azure environment to ensure the company’s applications scaled to support projected growth. The work also identified potential cost savings the company could realise.

Leaven investigated five key areas to gauge the state of Medi-Map’s Azure environment, including scalability, availability, resiliency, security, and DevOps. Feedback covered both the good and the bad and prioritised over 100 recommended improvements for future release cycles.

“The surface area on Azure from a functionality perspective is huge, and growing every month” Hilton said. “Rather than wrestle with three to four options, Leaven understood each use case, narrowed the options and outlined the pros and cons of each so we could make an informed decision with confidence.”

While Leaven’s review pinpointed wide-ranging improvements, Hilton specifically mentioned an early win involving the retirement of a load balancer – technology that distributes web traffic across multiple servers to improve application performance and resiliency. Switching to Azure’s Web Application Gateway, described by Hilton as a “load balancer on steroids”, the technology enables hardware scaling profiles to support variable traffic while maintaining systems availability and application uptime. The move provided Medi-Map with greater functionality at a lower cost than the original load balancer supported.

Switching on DevOps

A fan of agile development but unfamiliar with its application to Azure DevOps, Hilton used Leaven as a sounding board to critique his early foray into the domain. Using both Kanban and Taskboard for each sprint, Hilton wanted to fine-tune his team’s agile processes with a view to shortening release cycles, improving the accuracy of task estimates, increasing the quality of development, and improving the visibility of resource availability for future projects.

“We went through that with Leaven and the feedback was encouraging – it gave us confidence to move forward,” he said. “We went from virtually no implementation to using agile processes daily – without drowning everything in IT speak.”

Ongoing management key to confidence

Now with a better understanding of the rules of the game in Azure, Medi-Map operates with new confidence in the cloud. However, a less heralded part of the health services provider’s progress comes from Leaven sibling CCL, who provides cloud monitoring and security under the guise of its Managed Cloud Service (MCS).

Covering Medi-Map’s Azure environments with ongoing management and support, including monitoring, alerting, and threshold management, MCS delivers control and transparency to align the company’s internal team with external providers, Hilton said.

“CCL’s management overlay is a huge value add, introducing practices to make it easier to manage our environment, and transparency to put internal and external teams on the same page,” he said. “The ability to get the attention of an individual rather than just an 0800 helpdesk is extremely comforting.”

Public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure increasingly form the foundations of global facing companies. But getting the best from these services is harder than it looks. It pays to know your way around. “You don’t know what you don’t know – ignorance is not bliss,” Hilton said.