Viva Health Runs SAP on the AWS Cloud to Boost Future Readiness

Viva Health is an Indonesia-based integrated health service provider serving over 5 million customers across more than 142 pharmacies in West Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta, East Java and Bali. Aside from medicine and healthcare products, 50 percent of Viva Health’s pharmacies are also integrated with doctor consultation services.

To address a growing demand for healthcare e-commerce and teleconsultation services in Indonesia, Viva Health sought to modernize its IT infrastructure. In 2019, Viva Health decided to move its SAP Business Suite on HANA to the cloud. Previously, it ran SAP on an on-premises infrastructure, making the provisioning of new servers a costly process. Scalability was also an issue. Viva Health experienced frequent outages and hardware failures, especially during periods of heavy workloads. Hardware replacements often took up to 2 days to arrive and a further 2 days to deploy. This impacted Viva Health as its production business had to operate around the clock and could not afford downtimes.

With help from Cloud Comrade, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) SAP Competency Partner, the company successfully migrated to the AWS Cloud within 4 months, achieving near-zero downtime and laying the groundwork for its digital expansion into e-commerce and teleconsultation.  

Cloud Comrade runs Viva Health’s infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to increase the compute capacity and scalability, and deploys Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for SAP storage and backup respectively.

In particular, Amazon EC2 allows Viva Health to optimize its compute capacity based on business needs. For example, it can easily scale up at the end of the month when it consolidates business reports across all its pharmacies. With fewer system disruptions, Viva Health’s business reporting became almost 2 times faster.

For Viva Health’s IT team, fewer disruptions meant they can focus on business objectives by continuing to innovate and developing Viva Health’s various internal applications, and e-commerce and omni-channel solutions.

“The new system is more scalable and reliable in supporting our varying SAP workloads. The infrastructure is also well-positioned to support the business’s high-performance needs. These are all critical steps on our digital transformation journey, as we look to innovate and become more competitive in the Indonesian market,” says Jimmy Gabriel, head of IT at Viva Health.  

Cloud Comrade migrated Viva Health’s workloads in 2 phases. It began with the less critical environments, such as product development and Quality Assurance Systems, followed by the more critical production environment. Cloud Comrade also enlisted the help of SUSE, an AWS Partner, to upgrade the operating system in the SAP infrastructure. The entire process was completed in half the time Viva Health had allocated initially.

Migrating to AWS made it easy for Viva Health to fortify its cybersecurity and comply with health data regulations. For example, the company uses a combination of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) as an additional layer of security and governance of access.

“When Viva Health was storing patient health data on premises, it had to manually update its systems to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA),” explains Muadz Abdurrohman, country manager of Indonesia at Cloud Comrade. “Now, since AWS is already HIPAA-compliant, manual updates are no longer required.”

Viva Health plans to migrate its non-SAP workloads next, such as storage and file processing applications. Once the migration is completed, Viva Health will be able to offer a new suite of digital products and services, and improve its competitiveness against other health service providers in the country.

“It is vital for Viva Health to continuously find new ways of delivering more value to our customers. That is why we have to modernize our infrastructure and fully embrace a cloud-based environment. Not only does this support the business, but it also supports the growing demand for omni-channel healthcare providers in Indonesia,” says Gabriel.  

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