Case Study: Healthcare Cloud Migration to Azure
A regional healthcare practice moved from aging on-prem infrastructure to a HIPAA-aligned Azure environment — 99.9% uptime and 30% lower IT cost.
Client: Regional Healthcare Practice — Healthcare / HIPAA-regulated
The challenge
- Aging on-premises servers causing weekly outages
- HIPAA compliance gaps flagged in a recent risk assessment
- No defensible disaster recovery plan
- Rising hardware refresh costs on the horizon
The approach
- Compliance gap analysis: Mapped current environment against HIPAA Security Rule controls.
- Target architecture: Designed an Azure environment with Entra ID, conditional access, and BAA-covered services.
- Phased migration: Moved workloads in 3 waves, lowest-risk first, with rollback plans for each.
- Security hardening: Implemented MFA, EDR, log retention, and encrypted backups.
- Audit prep: Documented every control and rehearsed the audit interview with leadership.
Results
- 99.9% uptime achieved post-migration
- Passed HIPAA compliance audit on the first attempt
- 30% reduction in total IT costs
- Disaster recovery now testable in under 4 hours
Tools used: Microsoft Azure, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Defender for Endpoint, Azure Backup, Conditional Access