Unimed do Brasil enhances disaster recovery operations by migrating to OCI

A leader in the supplementary healthcare sector in Brazil, Unimed do Brasil operates the country's largest care network with over 150 owned hospitals, more than 2,500 accredited hospitals, a number of urgent care clinics and laboratories, and a system of 340 medical cooperatives providing care to over 20 million people with health and dental plans. The company also leads the Supplementary Health Performance Index, an official evaluation of the health insurance sector conducted annually by ANS, the government body responsible for the regulation of private health insurance plans in Brazil.

Representing the cooperatives and companies of the Unimed System, Unimed do Brasil runs a large-scale operation and manages a high volume of data while adhering to strict legislation. With its existing operations powered by a hybrid IT environment, the organization needed to migrate some of its on-premises data centers to the cloud. Company leaders wanted to create a robust and secure disaster recovery plan that could help maintain business continuity.

With Oracle Exadata as its primary database, Unimed do Brasil chose to continue working with Oracle and selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for the company’s cloud migration. The business appreciated the close collaboration between the Oracle technical team and Unimed, which contributed to the project's design, architecture, and implementation.

By migrating some of its data centers to OCI, Unimed do Brasil gained a reliable disaster recovery process and improved the overall performance of its systems. Previously, the data structure was spread across different hardware. With OCI, all resources are centralized and can be activated from a single point with more agility, and without the risk of compromising its back-office and customer service operations.

Several core application processes also achieved a 60% performance boost. For example, data query times were reduced from an average of 1 hour in the previous environment to just over 10 minutes on OCI. With Oracle Exadata running on OCI, Unimed do Brasil also obtained end-to-end encryption for the data sets allocated there, as well as automatic updates to the console, which allow the infrastructure team to focus on more strategic functions. While Unimed do Brasil is still operating in a hybrid cloud model, the infrastructure teams of both companies are planning to scale other workloads in the cloud.