RMS Uses Hybrid Cloud & DRaaS to Improve Performance and Reliability
For RMS daily operations constitute high-speed, high-volume transactional data. Uptime is critical, as is disaster recovery and business continuity.
Introduction
RMS is a healthcare remittance processing firm based in Oklahoma City that serves healthcare providers and banking partners nationwide. Through proprietary software, RMS automates the complex remittance process, accelerating the revenue cycle, decreasing costs, and reducing days in accounts receivable.
Established in 2006, the business has grown rapidly and now serves more than 1,000 healthcare providers and 45 banking partners.
RMS built and managed its IT infrastructure in TierPoint’s Oklahoma City data center. As the company grew, demands on IT capacity and increasing needs for security and disaster recovery pushed RMS to reevaluate its IT infrastructure.
Challenges
Since its inception, RMS had built, staffed, and managed its own IT operations. It had grown from two servers to 11 cabinets in TierPoint’s data center. Maintaining outdated hardware was becoming a challenge, as was trying to keep up with best practices in security and disaster recovery. After 10 years of growth, the level of technology and resources needed began to outstrip its internal capabilities.
Scott Thomas, CEO and founder, said, “We had to decide what we wanted to be experts in. Remittance processing is extraordinarily complex; did we want to become IT experts, too? We didn’t just need more equipment; we needed an entirely different system to move our business forward.”
Once the decision was made to partner with TierPoint and move to a cloud configuration, RMS’s challenge was to double its capacity while running at full speed a system that utilizes more than 500 applications and processes millions of dollars in daily transactions.
Clients were initially concerned about relying on a third party for operations and disaster recovery and needed to be included in the process.
Solutions
RMS worked with TierPoint to design a custom cloud strategy, using a hybrid private cloud and additional sites for disaster recovery and business continuity.
The cloud configuration enables RMS to quickly expand on demand. “At some point, you can’t undo what you’ve built and it’s difficult to update,” said Greg Bugaj, Chief Information Officer. “As our needs changed, the old system just didn’t work for us anymore. We needed a total reboot: that’s what TierPoint’s hyperconverged, hybrid cloud did for us.”
To improve disaster recovery and business continuity, the solution provided two additional back up sites. RMS had been using TierPoint’s Oklahoma City and Tulsa data centers but wanted to get one footprint out of “tornado alley.” TierPoint’s data center in Dallas filled the bill.
The custom DRaaS solution provides RMS with guaranteed 100-percent uptime and failsafe business continuity protection, important criteria for its healthcare and banking customers.
Mapping applications to the cloud, standing up equipment, and implementing the new system took about three months, followed by nine-to-12 months to migrate all the company’s historic data.
Maintaining customer confidence during the transition was critical. “TierPoint was a very visible part of our IT transformation,” said Thomas. “Clients liked the managed services concept but were wary of such a big change. TierPoint helped customers get comfortable with it, from strategy presentations to data center tours with customers and auditors.”
Results
With IT infrastructure in the cloud, RMS can now grow on demand – no small feat with year-over-year growth in the 30 percent range. When capacity reaches 80 percent, RMS can quickly expand by adding nodes to the cloud configuration, avoiding the traditional costs and limits of standing up new equipment.
“Before, we outsourced a lot of work to third parties,” said Bugaj. “Now that we rely on TierPoint for managed services, it eliminates the process of identifying, selecting, and managing an array of consultants. We also have been able to reduce our inhouse staff. As technology advances, so does the need for expertise and it can become a race to keep up. By moving to managed services, those highly technical positions are handled by TierPoint, and we can focus on IT strategy and business planning.
CEO Scott Thomas said, “Once we migrated to the cloud, the efficiency of all our applications greatly improved. They were faster and more reliable. Our end customers don’t see how much smoother our operations are, but we have far fewer stresses on our side.
“In retrospect, it would have been a risk to the entire organization to tackle the migration ourselves. TierPoint has a deep bench of expertise and was able to solve whatever came up,” Thomas said.
At A Glance
Industry
Healthcare
Technology
Hybrid Cloud/Private Cloud
DRaaS
Challenge
Rebuild a patchwork of IT infrastructure to enable rapid scalability and increase reliability.
Solution
Move from self-managed colocation to a private cloud while increasing and maintaining full production capacity and improving disaster recovery/business continuity.
Results
With the hybrid cloud solution, RMS can scale their IT infrastructure on-demand to meet explosive growth. A custom DRaaS solution also provides RMS with guaranteed 100-percent uptime and failsafe business continuity protection.
Website
rmsweb.com
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