Interview: Qcentive Saves Significant Amounts on AWS while Enabling Cloud Computing in Healthcare

We talked with Bill Gullicksen, Director of IT at Qcentive, about how the company is using ParkMyCloud to save money on their AWS costs while enabling cloud computing in healthcare.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. Can you start by telling me about Qcentive and how you are using the cloud?

We are a 2-year-old healthcare startup founded through the venture capital arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA). We build systems for the healthcare industry to help reduce costs in healthcare and provide efficiencies. Our cloud-based payment platform will facilitate the development and management of value-based contracts between healthcare companies. We are excited to be one of the earliest vendors authorized to take healthcare information and move it securely to the cloud.

What do you think made Qcentive stand apart as the best option for moving data to the cloud?

Healthcare has historically been cloud-averse due to issues like privacy and security concerns. In order to prove the use case for cloud computing in healthcare, we needed to build out a prototype and go through many months of meetings–producing artifacts to prove that we could move data to the cloud in a HIPAA/HITECH-compliant and secure manner.

We’ve recently released our first prototype module of the application by taking years of patient and healthcare contract information, loading it all into AWS, and then putting our application on top of it. Our application allows our health plan customers and their value-based contracting provider partners to analyze healthcare claim records, emergency room visits, etc. and to quickly calculate how to potentially realize savings in those areas.

So as you’re helping healthcare companies transition to the cloud, how did you come to find ParkMyCloud as a useful tool for your mission?

We had a few architects just going to town on AWS during the first year we were in business. They were building away, and all of a sudden our monthly AWS costs began to ramp up. We were spending a lot of money on Amazon and we didn’t even have a working application yet!

Last summer I was put in charge of our AWS operations and was asked to address our AWS costs. I asked, “what can we do to get some of these costs under control?” We started out with some rightsizing exercises and scaled some stuff back and that got us some savings. We found areas where we have had some stability and used Reserved Instances there, allowing us to get a 30–40% discount, but we didn’t want to do long-term commitments so we only did those for a year.

For the remaining instances, I realized we pay by the minute and we really don’t need to be running instances 24/7. That’s that’s when we started thinking about how to schedule instances to shut down. I could do that and turn them off with AWS tools, but then telling an instance to turn itself back on at 6 in the morning–I didn’t have a way to do that. And that’s when I found out about ParkMyCloud and said this looks perfect — we can schedule instances to get them running 12 hours a day, 5 days a week instead of 24/7 and we’ll probably cut our costs in half.

Have you discovered any other benefits while using ParkMyCloud?

ParkMyCloud was the perfect tool for what we needed at the time and it also gave us a side benefit where we could give developers, QA people, and even data analysts and business folks the ability to turn an instance off when they’re done, or turn it on without having to write a bunch of complex policies within AWS.

Before, if we only wanted certain people to be able to manipulate a handful of instances, I had to put those instance IDs in the policies. Instance IDs frequently change, so running custom policies was taking a lot of overhead and we got the benefit from ParkMyCloud of just assigning them teams. Now, whether the instance IDs change or not, there’s no extra work for our IT team.

That’s why we chose ParkMyCloud and why we’ve been using it for 6–7 months now. For me it was great, very simple to set up, simple to use, easy for non-technical users and with very little effort from me and my technical staff, so it’s been perfect.

Great. So it seems like you were using a good mix of different cost savings efforts between the reserved instances, the rightsizing, and ParkMyCloud. Is there anything else you’re doing to manage cloud re-infrastructure costs?

Those are the bulk of it. We have other cloud-tracking subscriptions that we use sometimes. They are very simple but I just use it for looking at the daily spend, seeing if there’s any unexpected spikes, things like that. I can use it for finding resources that are no longer being used. It’s nice to have for identifying orphaned volumes and gives me a simple, easy way to clean some of that up, but we get our biggest use out of ParkMyCloud.

What percent of your resources are currently on ParkMyCloud schedules?

We’ve taken some schedules off just to keep some systems up for a while, but our rule of thumb has been to put a schedule and a team on everything. Even if a schedule is running 24/7/365, we want to at least have a schedule on it and know that it’s a conscious business decision we made to keep that up versus “it just slipped through the cracks and we never looked at it.”

About how many people in your team or organization are using ParkMyCloud?

Somewhere around 15 or so users.

Where do those users sit within your organization?

I’m Director of IT and we’ve got a Director of DevOps and a DevOps engineer–we are the three technical resources around infrastructure. Then we’ve got around 10 or so software developers that all have access so they can spin up their dev environments and spin them down when they’re not working.

We have a flexible schedule. Some of our software developers do their best coding at 3 in the morning. If they get up with an idea and they want to code, they need the ability to start up instances, do what they need to do, and then turn them off when they’re done. So they’re all in there, our QA department and some business analysts that do a lot of data analysis and database querying are also using ParkMyCloud.

That makes sense. So, how much are you saving on your AWS bills using ParkMyCloud?

Our initial savings with ParkMyCloud were significant and the product paid for itself quickly. Based on business needs, our costs can escalate rapidly so we estimate we’re saving up to 20% on our costs on a monthly basis.

We’ve got a lot of instances that we keep normally parked now and we only turn them on when there’s a workload to run. And then we’ve got probably another 40 or 50% of our instances that only run Monday through Friday, from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, so we’re getting that savings there which to me is bigger savings than dealing with Reserved Instances.

Things like Reserved Instances look great the day you buy them, but then the first time you have to change the size on something, all of the sudden you’ve got Reserved Instances that you’re not using anymore. With ParkMyCloud that never happens, it’s all savings.

How did you first hear about ParkMyCloud?

We were interviewing an external technology company, G2 Technologies in Boston last summer that was being brought in to augment our CI/CD process. While they were in we asked, “hey, do you know any good methods for doing scheduling?” — and they said take a look at ParkMyCloud.

Any other feedback for us?

I was surprised how simple ParkMyCloud was to get up and running. It was a couple of hours from signing up for the trial to having most of the work done and realizing savings, which was great. The release of your mobile app has been fantastic because it’s nice if we need to turn something on for somebody that doesn’t have access on a Saturday when I’m 30 miles away from my computer. I can do it anywhere with the mobile app.

Glad to hear it! I think that wraps things up for now. Thank you Bill, I appreciate your time.

You’re welcome!

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on March 8, 2018.