Buddy Healthcare
NordHero helped Buddy Healthcare to migrate and transform their current solution to AWS in highly secure manner, and in the given time frame, utilizing scalable serverless container platform.
Buddy Healthcare is a Health Tech company transforming care coordination in hospitals and clinics by making care accessible and measurable for everyone, everywhere and anytime. The company simplifies and optimizes communication between patients and hospitals through its Mobile Care Coordination and Patient Engagement Platform.
The technical solution consists of the BuddyCare Dashboard for healthcare professionals and BuddyCare App for patients. Founded in 2016 the company has both national and international customers that range from University Hospitals (Tays, HUS), Central Hospitals (ksshp, Soite) to private hospitals and clinics (Orton).
As the protection of personal data and data security regulation (GDPR) increases all over Europe, Buddy Healthcare, like many other Health Tech companies, was faced with a challenge: How to transform the current infrastructure to suit the ever-increasing regulation and meet scalability requirements?
In addition to ensuring their solution is on par with regulation, Buddy Healthcare also wanted to automate maintenance tasks and update its infrastructure to the most advanced technologies available. Their solution was to migrate and make the best use of the managed services provided by AWS Cloud.
The Buddy team chose AWS because it was already an authorized service provider that had passed Buddy Healthcare’s customers’ extremely tight security requirements. In addition, the company had already utilized AWS to some extent and found better compliance and high scalability as significant benefits. AWS has the broadest global coverage of local data centers in the world and is currently ranked as the leader of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
In order to make the migration possible, the company decided that it was more efficient to seek out a partner who already possesses in-depth knowledge of IaC and security practices in AWS than to accumulate the experience on their own. As a result, NordHero stepped in and took on the challenge.
In a nutshell, NordHero’s job was to migrate and transform the current solution in a highly secure manner, in the time frame given from the previous platform to the AWS environment using containers. The work involved e.g.:
Planning and setting up the basic infrastructure Since Buddy Healthcare had not previously operated in AWS in this extent, the entire environment had to be planned out and set up before anything could be migrated. This involved transforming how the solution had previously been operated to AWS services’ best practices and advantages.
Migration using containers NordHero migrated BuddyCare Platform and App to AWS utilizing the highly scalable and easily manageable serverless container platform as the heart of the infrastructure.
Setting up easily manageable AWS organization structure Nordhero planned out the AWS account structure for BuddyCare Platform and set up AWS Control Tower to manage account creation and management for development, testing and production purposes, leveraging centrally managed guardrails to meet the required security and traceability disciplines.
Leveraging best-of-breed DevOps practices with continuous delivery pipelines NordHero created DevOps pipelines and automation that would deploy infrastructure configurations and application code to testing and production environments.
AWS platform and security configuration NordHero was there to help with all AWS specific web, infrastructure and information security issues and adjustments needed to ensure the maximum level of security, controllability and traceability inside the service. NordHero helped Buddy Healthcare to set up for example service metrics, logging and audit trail management practices, data encryption practices, backup management practices and firewall configurations.
Documentation Buddy Healthcare operates under the European Union Medical Device Regulation (MDR), which meant that all the processes had to be clearly documented for legislative purposes. NordHero helped Buddy Healthcare to document the platform setup and configurations to meet the regulation needs.
Right on time With the help of NordHero team, Buddy Healthcare was able to complete the cloud migration project in the desired time frame.
Top tier information security that meets national and international legislation and regulations NordHero’s Teemu Niiranen is probably one of the most skilled professionals out there when it comes to information security and encryption issues on AWS (at least in our opinion!). With the help of Teemu and the rest of the NordHero team, Buddy Healthcare was able to ensure its infrastructure meets the strict requirements and regulations of all the countries it is currently operating in.
Fast track for learning and running AWS From the beginning, it was clear to both parties that the infrastructure and services set up in AWS should be operated independently in the future by the Buddy team. This meant that along the way, the Buddy team of developers were working closely with the NordHero team to ensure that they had sufficient knowledge of the architecture and knew how to make modifications to the system in the future. NordHero planted the base for the Buddy team to take control of their own operations inside the AWS environment as well.
Read more: https://www.buddyhealthcare.com/en/
NordHero convinced us with their expertise and willingness to commit to our project fully. They also ensured us that they could complete the project in the schedule we desired. NordHero was a good match for us, they had a great combination of know-how to fill our specific needs. As soon as I saw that the project was actively carried out and in good hands I was even able to distance myself from the project and focus on other matters.
- Jukka Hassinen, CTO, Buddy Healthcare.
