About Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute
Founded in 1984, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) is the largest independent medical oncology/hematology practice in the United States. With over 230 physicians, 200 nurse practitioners and physician assistants and nearly 100 locations in their network, they are committed to providing world-class cancer care in community-based settings close to home.
Case Study Snapshot
- Created a hybrid cloud solution by connecting to AWS, via Megaport, from their Cyxtera data centre.
- Enabled easy transportation of mission-critical data workloads such as medical history records, X-ray scans, and general patient information out of AWS and back to their colocation environment.
- Reduced traffic latency and right-sized their bandwidth to provide efficient and optimised data flow and the ability to access patient records in real time.
- Built secure and private data connections between their hybrid cloud environments to account for sensitive data.
Challenges
Focussing on its mission to be the preferred choice for patients and referral sources for superior, compassionate, community-based cancer care in Florida, FCS places great importance on the use of next-generation technologies to generate positive patient outcomes. FCS aims to provide the most advanced cancer treatment, utilising cutting edge technologies and research, in a setting where patients can be close to home, surrounded and supported by family and friends.
To provide this high level of patient care, and drive their incredible research efforts, the team at FCS must have fast, easy, and cost-effective access to mission-critical workloads for data processing. With data such as patient records and history stored and processed both on-premises in a Cyxtera colocation data centre and in the cloud with AWS, FCS needed centralised control over their hybrid cloud environments.
The challenges for FCS included:
- Time delays and latency issues in migrating mission-critical data workloads, such as medical history records, X-ray scans, and general patient information, from AWS into their colocation data centre environment for processing.
- Finding a high-performance network that would enable seamless transitions of data between the SaaS applications needed in AWS to databases and compute in Cyxtera – without needing the sacrifice their cloud strategy.
- Security risks associated with transporting sensitive data across the public internet which is particularly important for ensuring patient confidentiality.
- Restrictions in choice when planning to scale the Company’s cloud strategy beyond AWS to access multicloud solutions.
Solution and Benefits
FCS created a hybrid cloud solution by connecting to AWS, via Megaport, from their Cyxtera data centre presence which enables the Company to:
- Easily transport mission-critical data workloads such as medical history records, X-ray scans, and general patient information out of AWS and back to their colocation environment in a Cyxtera data centre for processing and analysing.
- Access patient records in real time and control data flow on demand between private colocation environments and the public cloud.
- Ensure dedicated connectivity to AWS where the Company uses VPCs, S3, and EMR in the cloud to deliver and process gigabits of data.
- Reduce their traffic latency between the public cloud and their on-premises infrastructure by getting closer to the cloud within their geographical location.
- Ensure secure and private data connections between their hybrid cloud environments whereby patient confidentiality is paramount and data is sensitive.
- Right-size and scale their bandwidth up and down depending on workload requirements, with the ability to cost-effectively handle burst traffic.
“Florida Cancer Specialists are able to support in real-time, patient-centered records that make information available instantly and securely. Reduce work down to seconds on data records processing.”
– Senior Network Engineer, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Centre
FCS Connectivity Model
Future Plans
In the future, FCS plan to develop compute instances with multiple public cloud providers to manage their hosted applications and hybrid compute instances. Unlocking the many benefits of a multicloud solution, and gaining access to best-in-class cloud services, will enable FCS to continue on their mission of driving progressive research and delivering the highest level of patient care for cancer patients across North America.
“We gained more control over our cloud environments by using Cyxtera and Megaport to aggregate our traffic back to one place, apply policies, and prioritize our traffic.”
Senior Network Engineer, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Centre