Integra adopts OCI for multicloud and gains 90% time savings

Integra LifeSciences is a multinational that makes medical devices and technologies used by surgeons during  neurosurgical and reconstructive surgery.

The healthcare company is regulated in the U.S. as well as by other governing bodies around the world. It must prove strict control of data throughout the digital systems it uses to design, manufacture, sell, and distribute technology.

This includes certifying the company’s security position through the patch levels, network architecture, network port information, firewall configuration, and other activities it observes in its digital systems.

Integra is also growing quickly, both organically and through acquisitions. Managers felt that the on-premises infrastructure for supporting Oracle E-Business and Oracle databases was not keeping up with the increasing demand for sales analytics. Reports were slow to generate and were often out of date by the time executives received them.

Additionally, Integra needed a solution that could reliably monitor and manage cloud-based applications, high-speed networking for comprehensive disaster recovery capability, and interoperability between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure.

The company wanted a secure, high-performance cloud environment that could be easily monitored. Oracle’s second-generation cloud infrastructure proved to be the solution Integra was looking for.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provided superior price-performance for the increasing amount of Integra business transactions for over 1,000 concurrent users. In addition, Oracle Active Data Guard helps ensure that data is safe and backed up in multiple OCI regional data centers to improve its platform resiliency. 

Integra took advantage of Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect to bring more data to its multicloud analytics process. “As a customer, we reap significant benefits from this level of cooperation between Oracle and Microsoft,” says Peter Gawroniak, senior director of infrastructure and operations at Integra LifeSciences.

By moving to OCI with Azure Interconnect, the nightly data processing time was reduced by more than 50%. Reports for daily sales invoices were processed more quickly, increasing time savings by up to 91%. Also, OCI’s ease of use enables Integra’s multitier application stack of compute nodes to be operated by a small team of DevOps engineers. Automation from OCI makes it simple for the team to observe and manage its computing infrastructure.

Dashboards provide a cross-tier view of applications, database, and infrastructure, allowing staffers to resolve performance issues in minutes instead of hours. This improved telemetry, logging, alerting, and automation immediately improved Integra’s security, allowing the company to quickly receive and fact-check suspicious alerts in less than a quarter of the time it took with previous systems.

“We’re able to anticipate problems before they happen. We’re able to recognize job flows in advance of heavy workloads. This level of proactive monitoring just wasn’t available in our previous platform,” says Gawroniak.

Integra also immediately saw performance gains and a new level of full-stack visibility across its entire infrastructure and applications with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, compared to on-premises. With OCI Compute, provisioning a new database now takes minutes versus 10 to 14 days on-premises. In addition, the cloud-based consumption model enabled cost savings with the ability to shut down DevTest and QA nodes during idle times such as weekends and holidays, even while maintaining 24/7 alerts for production nodes.