Incision Migrates to Cloud, Speeding Content Delivery 30x with Levi9 on AWS

Surgical skills e-learning and online operating room training platform Incision, worked with AWS Partner Levi9 to migrate its website and database to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and enhance the content experience for its users. It now delivers content 30 times faster and application performance has improved by a factor of 10. Built on AWS, the company can now serve its video-based courses with minimal latency. Levi9 helped Incision build a resilient, highly secure cloud infrastructure that can easily scale to accommodate the company’s planned global growth and service development.

Netherlands-based Incision is a scale-up business and provider of an e-learning platform called Incision Academy that supports the delivery of quality surgical care in hospital operating rooms. The platform provides video training courses for operating room personnel at all learning levels. Its courses cover a wide variety of areas such as how to prepare operating rooms, perioperative care, and anesthesia, with supporting video content of real-life surgical procedures and interactive 3D anatomical models.

Incision has a global customer base with key markets in Belgium, the Middle East, Scandinavia, the UK, and the US. It also recently launched a mobile app—called Incision Assist—to make surgical protocol information easily accessible for surgical staff on the fly. The app includes guidance for operating room set-up and covers all necessary surgical steps and postoperative instructions to support the continuous development of hospital surgical staff.

The company’s Incision Academy platform started to experience performance issues with its website because its database struggled to serve content to users fast enough. European customers were experiencing 30-second delays viewing webpages and access times outside of Europe were even slower. Customers started to complain and the company needed to act fast. It enlisted AWS Partner Levi9 to help migrate its website to AWS to improve performance and benefit from modern cloud services.

Levi9 began working on the project in July 2019 and created a roadmap and plan to migrate Incision’s website and database to AWS, completing the project in 6 months. Incision needed a database that could scale easily and be easy to maintain as its data needs grew. It chose Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which allows users to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. To ensure resilience and scalability for Incision’s new infrastructure, Levi9 used AWS Well-Architected which supports partners and customers to learn, measure, and build in the cloud using architectural best practices.

By building on AWS, Incision scales automatically during busy periods with video course content now served 30 times faster and with no buffering issues. The company uses Amazon CloudFront to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. To enhance the customer experience and monitor infrastructure, it uses Amazon CloudWatch, to observe and monitor resources and applications on AWS. “Our website can now instantly give our customers fast content access wherever they are located,” says Marijke Dekker, solution architect at Incision. “Using AWS to monitor our system means we can fix any issues before they begin to escalate.”

Courtesy: Incision

Levi9 also developed the Incision Assist app, which is linked to Amazon RDS by an application programming interface (API). To stream data and videos to its app, it uses a combination of Amazon CloudFront and AWS Elemental MediaConvert, to process video files to prepare on-demand content for distribution or archiving. To support this, it uses AWS Lambda, to run code without thinking about servers or clusters and scale easily.

Using AWS, Incision can easily meet high demand and only pays for the compute power it uses. Incision has also improved app response times by a factor of 10 by indexing app data. For this it uses Amazon OpenSearch Service to securely unlock near-real-time search, monitoring, and analysis of business and operational data.

User authentication is handled directly by AWS, so Incision does not have to store user data itself. The company also benefits from the in-built security and compliance of Amazon Cognito, which allows for secure, frictionless customer identity and access management that scales. “It feels like we can do anything we want to do with AWS,” says Dekker. “If there are any new capabilities that we need to add, AWS has a service for it, plus they can all be installed fairly easily.”

Because of the high levels of security in AWS services, Incision has confidence in the resilience of its infrastructure, with a penetration test revealing no serious vulnerabilities. “We didn’t even have to ask Levi9 about system security,” says Dekker. “Levi9 made sure our system was secure, plus with the inherent security of AWS services we can worry a lot less about cyberthreats.”

Levi9 is also building a data analytics platform on AWS to help inform product development and gain insights into how many times customers use its app, which app features are being used the most, and what data customers are searching for. Levi9 also created a data lake using AWS, to make it easier to analyze user activity and automate reporting. Using AWS, the company can get a complete history of its data to get insights without the need for an external analysis tool.

As Incision works on expanding its Incision Assist app business, it plans to use AWS Regions and Availability Zones to assist with data compliance in the countries it serves. In addition, the company is looking to use AWS for automated email campaigns to promote Incision Academy courses. “We work closely with Incision to evaluate the right AWS service for each business need,” says Miro Zorboski, delivery director at Levi9. “Since migrating to AWS, the company is now well placed to meet its ambitious growth aims.”

With Levi9’s help, Incision now has a resilient infrastructure to support its business goal of assisting 100 million operations annually. “Levi9 has worked hard to help us get the right solution to solve our technical challenges and support growth,” says Dekker. “We always know we can rely on their knowledge to make the most out of our use of AWS.”