AWS Case Study: ddsWebLink
DDS Ventures, Inc., a dental software company located in San Diego, CA, specializes in the development and management of Web-based application products for the dental industry. Their flagship product, ddsWebLink, was developed in response to the dental industry’s need for a HIPAA compliant method of sending, managing, and storing patients’ electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) among care providers.
When building ddsWebLink, the team researched costs associated with providing the service. Kelly Frederickson, President and CEO shares their findings, “Market research indicated that new servers at a fully managed co-location center would cost roughly $500 each per month. Based on our needs, we would need to spend approximately $3,000 per month in fixed costs. Then we’d need a system administrator at approximately $100K fully loaded cost.”
To minimize these capital expenses, including the IT staff required to manage the infrastructure, DDS Ventures chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Using AWS has allowed our organization to spend the majority of our limited human and capital resources on more critical and strategic business requirements such as sales, marketing, training and customer support.”
ddsWebLink is built entirely on the AWS “stack” – Amazon EC2 servers have been configured and deployed to support load balancers, web servers, application servers, and a MySQL database with replication. ddsWebLink also takes advantage of reserved instance pricing; “We benefit from the recent long term reserved instance pricing that AWS rolled out earlier this year which allows us to leverage a combination of reserved instances and flexible instances to manage our cash outlays,” explains Frederickson. Amazon S3 is utilized for storage of application data and backups of the database.
When asked about HIPAA compliance, Frederickson recalls, “A significant benefit of going with AWS was the list of modifications we didn’t have to make to our architecture! The number and quality of physical security safeguards taken by the EC2 and S3 teams were incredibly helpful to solidifying our HIPAA compliance. Our encrypted communication, access, and storage requirements were met with open standards that the AWS team easily facilitates. Moreover, by allowing self-service & management of our infrastructure, we had to worry even less about untoward access or prying eyes against our customers’ sensitive data.”
In addition to being HIPAA compliant, ddsWebLink has been able to expertly navigate today’s tough economic times due, in large part, to the fact that AWS maintains and manages their entire IT infrastructure. Frederickson says, “In our opinion the AWS model is, even in the best of economic conditions, the only way to go.”
“Furthermore, because AWS enables us to scale up instantly upon new customer acquisition it virtually eliminates the risk of downtime as a result of overload.” With the distributed nature of AWS infrastructure services, IT decision makers are challenged to think differently about their IT architecture. Frederickson explains, “The real benefit of the AWS cloud is that you start thinking about scalability & redundancy before you need it. Often, when you start a new business with your own fixed-sized infrastructure you don’t think early enough in the design process about how to scale it up.”
“With AWS we’ve also experienced technical and customer support that has been exceptional. Superiorly trained personnel, immediate response times and a feeling that we’re not ‘just another customer’ rounds out our overall satisfaction with Amazon Web Services.”
To discover more about ddsWebLink visit www.ddsweblink.com 
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