Hcor cuts US$1 million in data center costs through Oracle Cloud

Founded in 1976 in São Paulo, Hcor is a philanthropic hospital that strives to guarantee healthcare access to all social strata in Brazil. Its paediatric cardiology unit provides free care for children with congenital heart diseases and acquired cardiological problems. The multidisciplinary hospital is specialized in cardiology, neurology, oncology, orthopaedics, and diagnostic medicine.

Over the last several years, Hcor has invested heavily in IT technology as part of an ongoing digital transformation strategy, replacing outdated systems and introducing a more current model of IT management and governance. The shift was meant to help Hcor gain performance and computing power and reduce costs.

However, Hcor encountered some significant challenges while attempting to advance its digital transformation efforts. The organization’s technology infrastructure relied on old servers and physical equipment that was housed in a company-owned data center. The outdated technology and on-premises scenario made it difficult for Hcor to make progress on new IT projects.

Hcor evaluated several public and private cloud vendors and decided on Oracle Exadata Database Service on Cloud@Customer for the lower latency and higher computing power that was required, as well as a cost-saving investment. Oracle’s Cloud@Customer is an engineered system incorporating the fastest Exadata machines, which Hcor had already used on-premises.

By hosting the solution inside the hospital, Hcor gains the security of having the service in-house, while eliminating previous data center refreshes and operating costs.

The hospital’s IT team moved workloads and development platforms onto the Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer subscription service connected to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Hcor anticipates savings of US$1 million over five years compared to previous data center acquisition, license, support, maintenance, and operational expense costs. Hcor has also boosted its overall IT performance by 20%

The Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer appliance, run as a subscription service on-premises with data backed up to OCI, has contributed to a doubling of staff and technology investment from US$3.9 million to US$7.8 million per year.

The Oracle Exadata appliance in Hcor’s data center calculates the memory, central processing unit (CPU), and storage requirements for each project and allows cloud native app developers to work simultaneously on multiple patient care initiatives.

Thanks to the appliance’s ability to scale compute and storage capacity up or down quickly and easily, Hcor’s developers are launching healthcare projects 5X faster than before, delivering fully tested applications in one month instead of five.

In addition, the Exadata cloud service has increased the number of projects completed per month from 8 to 14, reducing the time to market of 2021’s backlog from 18 months to 10 months.

To cope with peaks and troughs in patient care computing requirements, Hcor uses Oracle Cloud resource distribution, drawing on production and disaster recovery environments to meet demand.

The additional computing power and high availability has also increased security, according to Hcor’s security team. As one of the Brazilian institutions working 24/7 and depending 100% on IT systems, the new infrastructure has increased Hcor’s estimation of information security from 47% to 92%.

Going forward, the hospital intends to expand its Cuidar Hcor program throughout Brazil, integrating with the entire healthcare network, using a multicloud strategy to test and implement new solutions, with OCI as the backbone.