Guidehouse worked with a leading National Institutes of Health facility on a cloud migration strategy to improve workflows, usability, agility, and resiliency.
Challenge
The organization tasked with overseeing IT operations for a leading National Institutes of Health (NIH) Institute wanted to modernize its technology operations. It was responsible for delivering industry-leading technological capabilities to the Institute’s end users, including researchers, postgraduates, and other academics. This involved enabling collation, analysis, and storage of large-scale datasets associated with its many research programs.
The Institute relied on enterprise-grade technology platforms, applications, and a wide range of digital tools to facilitate complex research processes. However, its IT infrastructure was hosted onsite while IT development, maintenance, and operations were outsourced to third parties with fewer than 10 people at their disposal. This made it challenging for the organization to consistently deliver optimal services.
Solution
The NIH facility chose Guidehouse as its trusted advisor to help solve these challenges based on its proven ability to drive agility, speed, performance, resilience, reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
The first step was for the Institute to work with Guidehouse to assess its existing operating model, identify improvement opportunities, and devise a long-term strategy to drive greater efficiency and effectiveness. Guidehouse identified cloud migration as the best option for the Institute to transition from its legacy systems. A successful cloud migration strategy would allow the Institute’s large-scale data management platforms to become more agile and resilient, while delivering advanced digital research applications to end users.
3 Steps to Strategically Migrate to the Cloud
The organizations collaborated to develop a strategic roadmap to support the adoption of a cloud technology, proactively mitigate risks, and define critical processes to ensure successful delivery of the eventual migration project.
Result
With a strategic roadmap encompassing clearly defined processes, initiatives, and dependencies, the Institute is now on a path to successful cloud migration. This includes implementation of a new, modernized architecture for its core systems to deliver long-term IT stability. Additionally, while cost reduction was not an initial priority, the Institute recognized several opportunities to reduce IT spend as an additional advantage of cloud migration.
The Guidehouse team will continue to work closely with the Institute’s leadership, providing ongoing advisory services and support. This includes creating the optimal balance between standardizing sophisticated IT platforms and introducing unique, innovative research tools and applications.
In determining the most cost-effective and high value IT operations areas to modernize and developing a strategic cloud migration plan, the Institute is better positioned to increase the ROI of its IT infrastructure.