Aarogyasri Health Care Trust of Telangana Health Department Migrates Critical Application to AWS in Less Than 5 Months

After a decade of quadrupling its usage year over year, a free healthcare program for low-income families run by Indian state government entity Aarogyasri Health Care Trust had outgrown its on-premises data center. To achieve the scalability that it needed to support continued growth, the trust decided to migrate the program’s infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, the department’s staff was not experienced in the cloud, and the stakes of the migration were high: it would be the first mission-critical application to migrate under the state government’s nascent cloud-first policy.

 

Aarogyasri Health Care Trust enlisted Dataevolve Solutions (Dataevolve), an AWS Partner and solutions provider that used AWS to complete the cloud migration in less than 5 months. On AWS, the health care trust made its applications highly scalable, available, and cost effective and demonstrated to Telangana state government the massive potential of the cloud.

Run by the state government of Telangana, Aarogyasri Health Care Trust facilitates health insurance implementation for catastrophic illness. Its flagship health program, the Aarogyasri Scheme, offers free health insurance that covers more than 2,400 surgeries and therapies for diseases and accidents affecting the heart, kidneys, and brain. The government issues an Aarogyasri card to families below the poverty line, who can use it at government and private hospitals to obtain healthcare services free of cost. Approximately 29 million people in Telangana state receive medical services through the Aarogyasri healthcare program.

 

After running in the collocated space in the Telangana State Data Center for more than 12 years, the Aarogyasri Scheme’s hardware had become outdated and didn’t have the capacity to support the program’s growth, leading to service outages. The time and financial investment required for installing new data center hardware would have been substantial, so the trust looked to the cloud. “We wanted to migrate to AWS because of its availability, scalability, and flexibility,” says K. Rajendran, joint director for infrastructure and communications at the Information Technology, Electronics, and Communications Department of Telangana State, who acted as a consultant to Aarogyasri Health Care Trust during the entire process of migration. Because the application involves private health data, the government was also drawn to AWS for its state-of-the-art data centers in India and the security of its services.

 

Telangana’s government launched a Cloud-First Policy in 2020 after AWS and Dataevolve pitched a long-term strategy for bringing the state government into the cloud. “Dataevolve was an automatic choice because the team was adept at migration,” says Rajendran. The Aarogyasri Scheme application would be the first major migration that Dataevolve performed for the government of Telangana, involving 47 TB of data and 20 applications across 30 servers. As it undertook this project, Dataevolve engaged AWS Professional Services, which offers a methodology based on internal Amazon best practices to help companies complete projects faster and more reliably while accounting for evolving expectations and dynamic team structures. “Cloud computing is empowering, and organizations using the cloud will be able to innovate cheaper and faster,” says Avinash Kommireddi, founder and CEO of Dataevolve. “With a snap of the fingers, the Aarogyasri Health Care Trust is able to set up enterprise-class services. This gives a precise outlier for every public sector organization that the cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.”

The project’s scale and time sensitivity required a strategic plan. With support from AWS Professional Services, Dataevolve used AWS Direct Connect, which lets companies create dedicated network connections to AWS, to establish a private connection through which network traffic could reach the data center without touching the public internet. That direct connection reduced the chance of bottlenecks and unexpected increases in latency. The company’s additional use of AWS Snowball—an edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device that supports petabyte-scale data transport—reduced the projected data transfer time from 3–4 months to just 30 days. From planning to deployment, Aarogyasri Health Care Trust completed the entire migration in less than 5 months with zero downtime and launched the application in April 2021.

 

The scalability of AWS means that Aarogyasri Health Care Trust doesn’t have to worry about service interruptions as it expands from one state to the rest of India. In addition, it has drastically reduced the time to provision new instances. “On AWS, we can create development environments on the fly and remove them when the development completes,” says Rajendran. Now, updates and feature deployment happen with virtually zero downtime, compared to as many as 24 hours of downtime using the on-premises system. The application’s high availability has reduced the number of customer service calls by 40 percent. “On AWS, the application has virtually zero availability issues, which gives leadership peace of mind,” says Rajendran. “We can focus on innovation and performance rather than on putting out fires.”

 

With support from Dataevolve and AWS Professional Services, Aarogyasri Health Care Trust quelled its apprehension about data security and privacy in the cloud by implementing an audit trail using AWS services such as AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and facilitates automated remediation. Aarogyasri Health Care Trust also gained encryption at rest on AWS, which means the trust can better secure its users’ sensitive data while it’s in storage.

 

Aarogyasri Health Care Trust has greater control of its cloud usage on AWS and as a result has seen 30 percent cost savings since completing the migration. “There was no way to meter the usage of the infrastructure that was collocated for other departments in the State Data Center,” says Rajendran. “But on AWS, we can simply pay as we go and determine the usage of applications from all state departments.” This flagship project rapidly advanced the state government’s acceptance of and progression toward the cloud. The government even used AWS support to establish the Telangana Cloud Center of Excellence, which uses its cloud-first policy to evaluate potential upgrades. “Our understanding of the cloud has increased with this migration,” says Rajendran. “The cloud center of excellence makes a business case for each application, determining whether to migrate it to the cloud or upgrade the existing hardware.”