HealthEdge® maintains data sovereignty in the cloud with Redpanda BYOC

Challenge

Time-consuming and costly platform management

HealthEdge is a digital healthcare solutions provider that runs a live telemedicine platform for claims processing, benefit administration, care management, and more — enabling health plans to provide patients with the care they need.

For years, HealthEdge relied on Confluent for Kubernetes to manage its Apache Kafka^® clusters. It got the job done, but for DevOps Manager Ted O’Hayer and his small team, waking up in the middle of the night to address issues with Confluent and their Kafka ecosystem was a regular occurrence.

The mounting cost of Confluent, coupled with the platform’s complexity, made it unsustainable. Consequently, the team needed a reliable, cost-effective alternative that could also keep patients’ sensitive medical data safe within HealthEdge’s infrastructure.

“We needed something that was 100% compatible with Kafka that we could simply drop in to replace Confluent.”

Why Redpanda

A BYOC offering that ensures data privacy and security

It was hard to find a fully managed platform where data doesn’t leave HealthEdge’s infrastructure. But when the team met Redpanda’s bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) offering, they described it as a “Goldilocks solution” that perfectly fit their needs for the following reasons:

• Simple architecture and low operational overhead
• Hands-off Kafka management within their environment
• Increased flexibility and developer-first features
• Fully-managed suite of connectors to unify different data sources
• Easy access to key metrics using Redpanda’s Prometheus integration

Choosing Redpanda BYOC also meant that HealthEdge didn’t have to go through additional security approvals for using an external partner.

“Redpanda's BYOC is a good way to keep sensitive data within our infrastructure without having to manage it ourselves.”

Results

Less time on late-night calls, more time delivering better patient care

With a simpler architecture and fewer moving parts than Confluent, switching to Redpanda has provided HealthEdge with significant operational cost and time savings, while its DevOps team enjoys the freedom from managing its Kafka ecosystem.

“We can rely on Redpanda to manage Kafka for us, patch it, update it, and monitor it,” Ted says.

“Redpanda helps us deliver on our service level agreements (SLAs) and keep data secure to comply with healthcare’s strict privacy and security standards."

Running a live telemedicine platform means people need to be able to reach their care managers at all hours. Fortunately, migrating to Redpanda was so seamless that Ted’s team created their first Redpanda BYOC cluster in just 10 minutes. Developers can also use Redpanda Console to quickly check the status of their brokers, topics, consumers, connectors, users, and access.

“With Redpanda, everything is much simpler and easy to use,” Ted says. “It’s also a relief to have the team of experts at Redpanda watching for and responding to issues. I sleep much more soundly because I know they’re on it.”

Furthermore, Redpanda BYOC allows the HealthEdge team to stay compliant and protect customer data by keeping it within their own infrastructure. Ultimately, the change benefits HeatlhEdge customers the most. Ted’s team can say goodbye to late-night calls and rest easy knowing their platform can reliably support patients around the clock.

The bottom line is: partnering with Redpanda means healthcare customers always have access to the services they need.