AWS Case Study: InstallFree

Since 1991, GDS has served as a trusted advisor in Healthcare with their unique understanding of both Clinical and Healthcare requirements to balance quality of care with increasing regulations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or Personal Credit Information Act. GDS integrated InstallFree and Amazon EC2 & Amazon S3 to deliver a virtualized version of GE Centricity along with their custom PAX system to their network of hospitals, doctors, and medical providers to comply with Electronic Medical Records Act.

Doctors and providers are able to log into a “cloud” portal, that authenticates via Active Directory, connects into Amazon EC2 to create a dynamic Peer to Peer aggregation of data (through a hybrid database call in the GDS datacenter) and present it to the doctor. The result is a universal client experience enabling doctors to securely login from their clinic, hospital or home office without violating HIPAA or other Privacy Acts. In addition, GDS only has to support a single virtualized package to run across the various hardware, OS, and VM delivery mechanisms.

“Implementing Electronic Medical Records systems can be quite an expensive undertaking in time and money for individual doctor’s offices, groups and hospitals,” said Shane Gunn, VP Global Data Systems. “Global Data Systems combined the power of InstallFree Application Virtualization with the scale of Amazon Web Services infrastructure to significantly reduce costs and enable flexible access with local processing of patient information and records in real time – without compromising patient privacy.”

InstallFree Managed Service Provider and Enterprise customers typically will leverage a traditional datacenter approach to providing our virtualized applications in either a Software As A Service or direct application deployment model. The idea to use Amazon Web Services in lieu of the traditional model evolved after Installfree discussions with GDS. GDS was running out of capacity in their datacenter and faced with the decision to delay signing on additional clients for their EMR Portal while they designed, built, and scaled a new data center or to investigate an alternative approach. InstallFree approached GDS to leverage Amazon Web Services infrastructure to deploy the GE Centricity portal to new customers like Pentucket Medical.

“Leveraging AWS eliminates a lot of the risks, complexity and costs of scaling, managing, and administering hardware in a traditional datacenter on the fly,” said , Jeanne Morain, Vice President Business Development & Strategy. “The dynamic nature at low costs enables our customers to quickly scale by augmenting their current solutions both in and out of the cloud without having to increase their CapEx and OpEx costs. This is particularly critical during today’s tough economic times – when customers are looking for alternatives that aid in extending IT as a Service, flexible delivery for both managed and unmanaged environments, and leveraging their existing investment in tools and processes.”

InstallFree customers like GDS and Pentucket Medical Associates have reported as high as 40% savings in costs associated with deploying and scaling the solution. They were able to reduce the time to market of the portal from 12-18 months to just 3 months.

“Leveraging Amazon AWS has saved InstallFree significant costs in development, services, and management overhead while increasing our overall time to value to enable key customers and partners to expand their footprint,” said, Jeanne “It would have taken us at least another 12 to 18 months worth of delays to expand into the off premise cloud and healthcare. This would have resulted in a critical loss of time and market opportunity to ramp as key regulations like EMR deadlines came to pass.”

By leveraging Amazon AWS, InstallFree is able to quickly test, ramp and make the “vision” of universal client computing a reality for regulated and unregulated markets across off premise and hybrid cloud models. Installfree’s combined solution provides cloud providers with the best of both worlds – ability to deliver rich applications that can be used locally, on the server, USB, or however the business requires at a fraction of the complexity, costs, or overhead.

“For InstallFree and our customers like Global Data Systems, Amazon Web Services is a breath of fresh air enabling smaller companies to compete based on the merits of our technology and innovation versus ability to ramp resources,” said Jeanne Morain, VP Business Development & Strategy, “Their offering is truly a game changing experience that enables us to focus our funds, efforts, and IP where it matters most – our core business without the risk, overhead, and costs of owning our own datacenter.”

For more information on InstallFree, visit http://www.installfree.com/ and see the announcement on GDS and Pentucket Medical Associates move to the cloud at http://www.installfree.com/newsroom/announcements/pentucket/