CBI Health Migrates 100+ Servers to AWS in less than 100 days with Adastra

CBI Health, a leading community healthcare provider in Canada, is constantly innovating to better serve its clients. To this end, it was looking for a robust, future-ready infrastructure that would allow access to advanced capabilities while lowering maintenance costs. With the help of AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner Adastra, it was able to migrate over 100 servers in less than 100 days from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using a lift-and-shift approach. CBI Health’s systems are now more scalable and reliable, and the migration opened the door to innovation with access to data science-enabled workloads.

CBI Health is Canada’s leading community healthcare provider, delivering innovative rehabilitation and home care programs in more than 250 locations across the country. Its team of 13,000 care providers makes over 12 million visits annually to make a meaningful difference in clients’ lives. Running such a large operation with on-premises infrastructure was inefficient. As Mark Segal, chief information officer at CBI Health, said, “Managing that kind of scale from a data center was simply not viable. It was a time and resource sink for us.” One of the major downsides of maintaining its on-premises data center was the high maintenance cost of physical infrastructure. In addition to this, the data center also required dedicated resources for monitoring and management, which meant a significant percentage of CBI Health’s team was diverted to data center maintenance. Further, on-premises infrastructure meant that CBI Health could not optimally prepare for its modernization plans because most of the latest technologies are being built in—and for—the cloud.

CBI Health identified a migration to AWS as best suited to its needs and began looking for a partner. It needed an assessment followed by a migration strategy and implementation. After evaluating several options, it chose AWS Partner Adastra for its AWS expertise and experience with cloud migrations. Deploying a lift-and-shift methodology, Adastra rehosted CBI Health’s massive workloads rapidly. Using AWS Application Migration Service helped Adastra automate the heavy lifting of the migration from on premises to AWS with excellent results.

“Adastra worked closely with our operations, applications, and security teams to decide on the best architecture for the solution and was able to migrate over 100 servers to AWS in less than 100 days,” said Segal. “We migrated more than 70 terabytes of data and are now hosted fully on AWS. And thanks to the training that Adastra provided our team on AWS services, we are now equipped to manage the system independently.”

Moving to AWS has meant significant savings for CBI Health. In addition to the cost savings on the physical maintenance and management of the data center, it has been able to simplify redundancy management to handle traffic peaks and data backups. With AWS, CBI Health only pays for what it uses and can scale up or down rapidly and seamlessly.

In addition to migrating to AWS, Adastra also used several AWS services that make it easier for the CBI Health team to manage their cloud resources and stay secure. AWS Control Tower provides a single pane for secure setup and governance of its AWS environment, helping to reduce the time and effort on routine maintenance. “It is really impressive to see how AWS Control Tower can deploy a fully functional and secure landing zone in a couple of hours, something that would have taken two months in the past,” said Elkin Arboleda, AWS practice lead at Adastra. AWS Backup enables central management and automation of data protection while AWS Transit Gateway, AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) work together to create a seamless and secure network path and gateway.

Today, CBI Health is in a strong future-ready position with a solid foundation from which to innovate and better serve its clients. The solution that Adastra has deployed using AWS services has enabled data science workloads for CBI Health, positioning it to deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning soon. And this in turn has paved the way for CBI Health to focus on improving its client services.

To support this improvement, CBI Health plans to work with Adastra to modernize its data and analytics solutions, using AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for its Data Lake, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker for artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.