Santa Casa de Marília boosts performance, reliability, and security with OCI

Growing constantly since 2012, the Brazilian philanthropic hospital needed a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure to fulfill its computing needs. Its existing on-premises server infrastructure, which hosted the organization’s medical records systems, needed upgrades to handle the growing amount of information.

Server resources were also strained because of the increased use of computing and memory power. Data backups took a long time, making the data vulnerable to security risks.

As the hospital collected sensitive data, it was necessary to comply with Brazil’s data protection law—Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais (LGPD)—as soon as it was going into effect. Existing on-premises servers lacked the security and privacy features necessary to comply with LGPD. Increased data volumes reinforced the necessity of this compliance to better protect and govern the sensitive personal data of the hospital’s patients.

As an Oracle Exadata Database Machine on-premises user, Santa Casa de Marília foresaw that Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer would excel against competitors and support the hospital’s growth. The highly available, cost-effective Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer is now managed by Oracle in a private cloud.

“Our team looked at a number of scenarios, including on-premises and cloud-based servers as well as other cloud providers. Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer provided the best value in terms of performance. It was also recommended by one of our partners,” says Erica Guimarães de Aguiar Gomes.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was also selected for its robust security and privacy features. The hospital hosted enterprise resource planning (ERP) and internal quality applications on OCI, for running processes such as document management.

With Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, the hospital now enjoys better database performance, increased computing and memory resources, as well as the ability to handle growing amounts of data. The Exadata cloud infrastructure processes large amounts of data faster and more securely because IT resources were no longer overloaded. Data analysis also became much faster.

Migrating its Exadata database to Oracle Cloud also gave Santa Casa de Marília the constant reliability and availability of the database. This is a crucial feature for the hospital because it speeds up access to data that helps facilitate physicians’ actions, which may be lifesaving in some situations.

With real-time access to hospital and patient data, Santa Casa de Marília’s seven-member IT team is able to monitor the systems and respond proactively in the event of an incident. This saves significant time that was previously spent on monitoring and creates space to focus on more strategic facets of the business.

The database cloud migration also enabled quick and easy data backups. Once a 16-hour process, backing up the hospital’s business and patient information is now completed in only minutes. The automated cloud process also eliminates the need to store data at multiple locations, as was the case earlier.

The hospital’s critical ERP application was the first to be transitioned to OCI to automate and improve billing processes. Vital in ensuring uninterrupted hospital operations, the use of this system was growing primarily due to increased data volumes. Tapping OCI’s elastic computing capabilities, the organization now accommodates this growth and rapidly scales up as needed.

Santa Casa de Marília worked with Oracle Partner Harpo Tecnologia de Dados to chart and implement the move to OCI. With Harpo’s guidance and support, Santa Casa de Marília was able to smoothly migrate to the cloud. “We made the transition on a Sunday morning, when there would be a window of opportunity. The process was seamless, and didn’t affect users at all,” says Erica Guimarães de Aguiar Gomes.