Our client, a mid-sized health insurance provider with approximately 9 million members, was seeking to modernize their IT infrastructure. They hired Significo’s DevOps team to optimize their internal DevOps processes, provide hosting and maintenance services, as well as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), and improve security compliance. As a result of our work, they saw significant improvements to their internal DevOps processes, eliminating bottlenecks and reducing costs while improving scalability, security, and more.

The challenge

From a DevOps standpoint, the organization struggled with:

• Outdated Legacy Systems – Their infrastructure relied on aging monolithic applications that were difficult to maintain, scale, and modernize. This created a bottleneck for deploying new features or responding to increased user demand.
• Scalability Constraints – Their existing environment lacked the flexibility to dynamically scale with user growth, leading to performance degradation and outages during peak loads.
• Infrastructure Limitations – Their on-premises and legacy cloud setup lacked containerization, orchestration, and automated scaling, making it challenging to efficiently allocate resources.
• Slow Deployment Cycles – Deploying updates or bug fixes required significant manual intervention, increasing the time to market for new features.

From an Internal Development and IT Operations perspective:

• Inefficient Scaling of Services – The lack of Kubernetes or containerized workloads meant that infrastructure scaling was cumbersome and often led to excessive downtime.
• No Real-Time Failover Capabilities – Their architecture did not support automated failover, making them vulnerable to system outages with prolonged recovery times.
• High Maintenance Costs – Maintaining and operating their infrastructure required significant manual work, increasing costs and reducing operational efficiency.
• Difficulty Adapting to Increasing User Needs – Their rigid infrastructure prevented them from responding quickly to growing user demand and regulatory changes.

From a Compliance and Security perspective:

• Healthcare Data Protection – As a healthcare-related platform, they needed to ensure the security of sensitive patient data, requiring strict adherence to HIPAA and other regulatory standards.
• Privacy Standards Compliance – The migration to cloud infrastructure had to be done in a way that upheld stringent privacy laws and ensured no data breaches.
• Regulatory Compliance During Migration – Moving critical workloads while maintaining compliance with healthcare regulations added complexity, as any misconfiguration could lead to significant legal and financial consequences.

Internal Development process or IT Operations challenges:

• Manual and Inefficient Development Pipelines – Deployments required manual intervention, slowing down releases and increasing the risk of errors.
• No Automated Infrastructure Provisioning – IT teams had to manually configure and provision resources, making the process error-prone and time-consuming.
• High Latency in Feature Rollouts – Due to a lack of modern CI/CD pipelines, feature rollouts took weeks, delaying innovation.
• Limited Observability & Monitoring – They lacked a unified logging and monitoring system, making it difficult to detect and resolve issues proactively.
• Strained IT Budgets Due to High Maintenance Costs – The cost of maintaining legacy infrastructure was growing unsustainable, diverting resources from innovation.

They faced multiple security and compliance hurdles, including:

• Ensuring HIPAA & Healthcare Data Protection – The migration had to be executed without compromising patient confidentiality and regulatory compliance.
• Data Encryption & Secure Access Controls – They required end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest while enforcing role-based access controls.
• Maintaining Auditability & Compliance Logs – Their infrastructure needed to generate and store audit logs for regulatory compliance and security monitoring.
• Adhering to Privacy Standards During Migration – The cloud migration required proper data handling to prevent leaks or unauthorized access.

Services Provided:

• DevOps:
  
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • Automated Compliance Checks
  • Secure Containerization
  • Monitoring and Logging
  • Disaster Recovery and High Availability
  • Performance Optimization
  • Security Best Practices Implementation
  • Cloud Services Management
  • Configuration Management
  • Version Control and Management
• Hosting
• Maintenance

Tools/approaches:

• Kubernetes
• Microsoft Azure
• Containerization
• Automated Failover Systems
• Resource Orchestration

They had an in-house development team, but they focused primarily on application-level improvements rather than infrastructure.

• Collaboration with Significo: Their developers worked alongside Significo’s engineers for a smooth transition, but Significo handled the cloud migration, DevOps automation, and performance optimization.
• Internal Team’s Focus: While the internal team focused on product development and feature enhancements, Significo optimized infrastructure, CI/CD, and security compliance.

Significo introduced multiple automations  of their processes as part of DevOps, including:

• Automated Failover & High Availability – Implemented Kubernetes-based failover mechanisms to reduce downtime.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform & Pulumi – Automating infrastructure provisioning and environment replication.
• CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub Actions & ArgoCD – To enable seamless deployments with minimal downtime.
• Containerization & Orchestration – Migrated workloads from traditional VMs to Docker and Kubernetes, improving resource utilization.
• Automated Monitoring & Logging – Integrated OpenTelemetry and Signoz for real-time observability and faster incident resolution.

Significo delivered significant improvements to their internal DevOps processes:

• Implemented Kubernetes-Based Infrastructure – Enabling containerized applications to scale efficiently.
• Optimized Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity – Improved failover capabilities and reduced recovery time from hours to minutes.
• Reduced Cloud Compute Costs by 35% – Through auto-scaling, efficient resource allocation, and rightsizing workloads.
• Established Observability & Logging Best Practices – Ensuring real-time monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting capabilities.

Significo provided a full spectrum of hosting and maintenance services, including:

• Cloud Migration to Microsoft Azure – Transitioned their infrastructure from legacy systems to a scalable cloud environment.
• Kubernetes-Based Infrastructure Management – Deployed a containerized architecture for improved efficiency.
• Disaster Recovery Optimization – Implemented automated backup strategies and failover systems.
• Continuous Maintenance & Infrastructure Monitoring – Ensuring high availability, security patching, and system reliability.

We helped with deployment and new features, including:

• Transitioned to a Scalable, Containerized Architecture – Allowing rapid iteration and deployment of new features.
• Implemented Blue-Green Deployments – Enabling seamless feature rollouts without service disruption.
• Improved Developer Experience – By automating deployments and providing staging environments that mirrored production.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD):

• Implemented GitOps with ArgoCD – Enabling automated, version-controlled deployments.
• Containerized All Services with Docker & Kubernetes – Allowing consistent deployments across environments.
• Automated Infrastructure Provisioning with Pulumi – Enabling self-service infrastructure for developers.
• Established a Robust Backup & Disaster Recovery Strategy – Ensuring system resilience with automated snapshots and rollback capabilities.

Outsourcing to Significo accelerated their development time. By offloading DevOps and cloud operations to Significo, they were able to:

• Reduce Deployment Time from Weeks to Minutes – Automated CI/CD allowed rapid iteration and feature rollout.
• Enhance Scalability Without Additional Costs – The move to a Kubernetes-based architecture meant they could scale dynamically as needed.
• Eliminate Bottlenecks in Infrastructure Management – Their engineers could focus on application development while Significo managed the backend infrastructure.

Additional benefits included:

• Faster Time to Market
• Higher Quality Software
• Enhanced Collaboration
• Improved Customer Satisfaction
• Competitive Advantage
• Improved Version Control
• Faster Bug Fixes
• Reduced Errors
• Easier/Help with Compliance
• Improved Security
• Cost Savings