GlobeMed Group simplifies IT management with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
The provider of healthcare benefits and claims processing for millions of people exits expensive data centers by moving production workloads to OCI.
Lebanon | Health
“The Oracle Cloud team listens to our needs to make sure that our challenges are understood. They help to guide us toward an appropriate OCI solution and make us feel like we’re part of the team, not just clients.”
Business challenges
Over 23 million people in the Middle East and North Africa region rely on healthcare benefits and claims processing services offered by GlobeMed Group’s franchise network. The company offers tools and expertise to help franchises manage their network of healthcare providers and administer health insurance claims, ranging from pre-certification of admissions and service provision to case management, claims adjudication, and payment settlement.
Development, testing, and production of the company’s benefits management system workloads were historically supported in an on-premises data center, using Oracle database and WebLogic suite. In 2018, the workloads were moved to a colocation data center to eliminate the requirements for maintaining physical infrastructure such as power, cooling, and facility security. However, the company’s IT staffers were still required to provision computing resources, maintain licenses and contracts, perform updates and patches, and manage system backup and disaster recovery processes. Allocating costs across colocation partners was complex and challenging. As these requirements became increasingly burdensome, GlobeMed’s leadership began to explore alternatives for migrating the company’s workloads to a cloud infrastructure.
Why GlobeMed Group chose Oracle
GlobeMed Group evaluated offerings from three major cloud providers. The company wanted to establish a high performing and highly available cloud infrastructure within a cost structure that would help the company meet user requirements while also establishing consistent and predicable OpEx costs. Also, the company wanted to optimally manage CapEx outlays and avoid interruptions of services to members during the migration, when legacy on-premises and cloud environments would be operating concurrently.
Based on these evaluations, GlobeMed selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its development, test, and production workloads. Oracle offered a straightforward pricing structure that did not include hidden and miscellaneous charges, which helped the company accurately anticipate costs. Additionally, it could convert existing on-premises licenses to OCI under Oracle’s bring-your-own license policies.
Results
The company migrated workloads to OCI across its 12 operating regions in a phased approach. To help ensure business continuity, GlobeMed set up disaster recovery sites for each region. Production environments ran on OCI, which significantly increased performance for internal and member end users.
OCI’s scalability made it easy for employees to provision for an expansion, while also allowing them to anticipate costs. When a new use case emerged, technical staffers set up a proof of concept in a segregated environment to develop and test the applications. This helped to explore new options, technologies, and tools without major investments in infrastructure. OCI Monitoring allowed the team to quickly assess out-of-the-box and custom performance metrics and optimize resource use and availability of infrastructure and applications.
About the customer
GlobeMed Group is the leading healthcare benefits management company in the region, offering support to insurance companies, mutual funds, and large employer plans with highly advanced tools and services.