If you're preparing for the Professional Cloud Architect exam, you probably know that Google recently updated the exam and many of the case studies. However, one case study from the old exam has stayed on the new PCA exam: the EHR Healthcare case study.
The case study is the same case study that was on the previous version of the exam. It focuses on a healthcare SaaS provider migrating from colocation facilities to Google Cloud to achieve a more scalable infrastructure, a better disaster recovery plan, and faster deployment of their containerized software.
EHR Healthcare is a leading provider of electronic health record software that serves hospitals and insurance providers globally. Because the healthcare and insurance industries are changing so rapidly, their business has been growing exponentially. Their current challenge is a classic lift and transform migration sparked by a data center lease that is about to expire.
Scaling a Containerized World
Something that stands out in the EHR environment is that they have already started their modernization journey by containerizing many of their applications. They currently run these on a group of Kubernetes clusters, but their existing technical environment has struggled with outages caused by misconfigured systems and inadequate capacity to manage spikes in traffic.
On the exam, you should focus on how to provide a consistent way to manage these customer facing applications that are container based. Since they need to leverage a scalable and resilient platform that can span multiple environments seamlessly, this is a prime use case for Google Kubernetes Engine. You will need to know how to use these tools to dynamically scale and provision new environments so they can onboard new insurance providers as quickly as possible.
Solving the Connectivity and Legacy Gap
One of the trickiest parts of the EHR case study is their legacy integrations. They host several legacy file and API based integrations with insurance providers on premises that they have no plan to upgrade or move at the current time. This means you must architect a secure and high performance connection between their remaining on premises systems and Google Cloud.
For the exam, look for solutions that maintain these legacy interfaces with connectivity to both on premises systems and cloud providers. You should also be prepared to answer questions about how to manage their users, who are currently handled via Microsoft Active Directory, to keep authentication consistent during the migration.
Visibility and Proactive Monitoring
The executive team at EHR is tired of responding to outages that result from inconsistent monitoring practices. Currently, their monitoring is done via various open source tools, and alerts are sent via email where they are often ignored. This is a major issue that a cloud architect must address.
A key part of your strategy for EHR should be providing centralized visibility and proactive action on system performance and usage. You will likely see requirements for consistent logging, log retention, monitoring, and alerting capabilities. The goal is to move the team away from manual infrastructure administration and toward a stable user experience that positions them for future growth.
Insights and Compliance
Finally, do not forget that EHR Healthcare must maintain strict regulatory compliance while finding ways to provide better insights into healthcare trends. They want to be able to make predictions and generate reports on industry trends based on the provider data they collect.
This implies you may need to recommend tools for creating interfaces to ingest and process data from new providers. On the exam, always look for solutions that reduce latency to customers while providing the analytical power the business needs to stay competitive in the medical industry.
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