Increasing Migration Speed by 40% and Reducing Costs by 60% Applying AWS Experience-Based Acceleration at CBI Health

CBI Health provides home health and outpatient rehabilitation to approximately 12 million Canadians each year. The company previously relied on a hybrid approach, combining paper-based scheduling and charting systems, on-premises legacy tools, and another cloud provider for its digital workloads.

CBI Health migrated to AWS to reduce costs and secure and modernize its infrastructure to help improve customer outcomes and experiences and drive efficiencies in its operating model. The company had over 500 physical servers and virtual machines in its legacy infrastructure, so modernization would be a significant undertaking. “All our assets were owned in data centers that required capital investments, hardware maintenance, and operation agreements,” says Mark Segal, chief information officer at CBI Health. “We saw this as an opportunity to modernize, be more efficient with our healthcare resources, and drive efficiencies in the business.”

With a focus on modernization and shutting down legacy infrastructure, CBI Health wanted a cloud infrastructure that was secure and highly scalable and provided opportunities to reduce costs. AWS met these needs. “AWS understood that driving down our costs in legacy infrastructure was vital before we talked about investment in future workloads,” says Segal. CBI Health chose AWS EBA to migrate the 70 TB of data from its legacy infrastructure of 500 servers to the cloud. AWS EBA quickly gained executive buy-in because it could accelerate the migration timeline with added financial and security benefits.

CBI Health achieved full migration in two sprints, working alongside AWS customer solutions managers and Adastra, an AWS Partner that specializes in data and analytics solutions. CBI Health applied AWS EBA to migrate 40 percent of its infrastructure in the first 3-day sprint. The company completed its migration during the second sprint, and by December 2023, CBI Health had no physical infrastructure remaining. It was also critical that the company didn’t experience any unplanned downtime during migration because this could adversely affect healthcare practitioners and the customers receiving care from them.

By harnessing AWS EBA, the company completed a full migration in 3 months with virtually zero unplanned downtime—and 40 percent faster than estimated. “We needed the right vendor relationship to modernize and migrate in time, and that is what we got applying AWS EBA,” says Segal. “Otherwise, this process might have taken years and not months.” CBI Health made the process of migrating workloads simpler through AWS EBA so that it could focus on modernizing and shutting down legacy infrastructure.

CBI achieved various benefits from its successful and efficient migration to AWS. The company is saving 60 percent on infrastructure costs, with the potential to increase that savings to 90 percent in the future. This cost reduction is in part because of the company’s 75 percent reduction in its technology footprint, achieved by migrating to the cloud and decommissioning legacy servers. “Our success as a team, and the most exciting part of the migration, was physically exiting a data center so that we could comfortably say that all CBI Health workloads, and all its support services, are cloud based,” says Segal.

There were employee benefits too. “Our teams saw this migration as an opportunity to upskill themselves,” says Segal. “We have new capabilities across our business to drive efficiencies in our operating model that better serve our employees and customers.” Now, the employees at CBI Health are better prepared for ongoing modernization and optimization.

CBI Health has also improved its agility for innovation. Using AWS, the company can patch infrastructure, test applications, and find new ways to securely access data. Additionally, it has improved the stability and availability of its infrastructure, achieving smooth operations and enhancing its ability to provide care.

CBI Health will drive more business efficiencies and find opportunities to better service its customers and employees using AWS while continuing to optimize costs in the long term. Now that migration to AWS is complete, CBI Health can explore new capabilities, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company also plans to improve its contact center using Amazon Connect, an artificial intelligence–powered contact center from AWS.

“Using AWS has helped us to literally remove the legacy technical debt completely, and in the future it will empower us with straightforward access to the data,” says Segal. “We’ll have new workloads in analytics, artificial intelligence, or other innovative components using AWS.”