Sometimes our clients develop business use cases that require change. Sometimes changes are driven from technical or licensing requirements, or market shifts. Sometimes it's a combination. In the case of Ironside's client Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) change was the result of both internal and external factors. CUIMC's legacy technology business intelligence vendor had advised them that their existing reporting software version was to be moving to an end of life and end of support status in an 18 month period. Columbia University Irving Medical Center CUIMC provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. CUIMC is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. As a leader in the area of developing our future medical practitioners CUIMC holds their operational capability in high regard. CUIMC is constantly evaluating their IT assets, tools and approach so they knew they needed to react quickly considering the importance the business intelligence reporting platform plays in their core mission.

In April of 2021 CUIMC looked to Ironside to advise on a direction and plan. Over the next several weeks Ironside worked closely with CUIMC advising on cloud solutions including costing, architecture, migration, benefits and advantages of moving to the cloud. After evaluating several approaches proposed by Ironside, CUIMC decided to migrate their applications and databases to AWS.

Utilizing several professional services offerings ranging from legacy assessment, architecture development to migration services, Ironside was able to put together a project plan with an execution timeline and milestones as well as provided all the resources necessary to take the risk out of this large upgrade and migration for Columbia.

Beginning in early 2022 Ironside took CUIMC's small AWS footprint and began deploying new accounts and services to address the critical needs: security, compliance, network design, backup, test and promotion processes, logging, monitoring and overall migration plan. On top of this work, the team executed a clean upgrade to the existing business intelligence software platform, bringing CUIMC back into a current, supported product life cycle. Within the newly provisioned AWS environment Ironside proceeded to work with CUIMC to complete installation and configuration of the new toolset to include testing, remediation, as well as multiple query executions, cube builds, and portal navigations. Performance criteria testing, user acceptance and sign off was completed earlier than initially estimated - and came in under budget.

"This was truly a team effort. Working with Ironside allowed us to address an important component of our enterprise. At the same time we were able to gain valuable insight into how best to leverage a cloud approach without disrupting our position as a leader helping to provide our communities with the very best practitioners possible across multiple fields."
- Christian Portilla, Associate Director of Financial Information Systems