FinOps brightens cloud future for Alpine Health Technologies

Offering reliable IT services for the health sector

Reliable IT services are critical in healthcare. Hospitals and other healthcare service providers need to manage sensitive patient data securely, exchange information quickly with other healthcare organisations and operate digital equipment around the clock to provide urgent care and support.

As one of the region's leading providers of healthcare IT solutions, Alpine Health Technologies helps hospitals, insurance companies and other organisations with cloud infrastructure support, application development and IT security to ensure IT estate security, increase technical efficiency, optimise their clinical documentation and medical billing systems, and more. By offering innovative tools and services based on the latest technologies such as cybersecurity solutions, machine learning and AI, Alpine enables its clients to meet the healthcare needs of Puerto Ricos’ three million residents.

To ensure that it could continue to offer cutting-edge IT services like these, Alpine had begun migrating to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. However, it soon found that its cloud costs were growing rapidly.

Alpine has worked with SoftwareOne since 2016, receiving support for software asset management (SAM), compliance assessments, IBM audits and Microsoft contract management and renewals. Knowing that SoftwareOne had helped it control costs through these other projects, Alpine asked for support in managing its Azure cloud consumption and spending.

Building Alpine’s foundation for a mature FinOps practice

Alpine planned to eventually move all its workloads to Azure, it wanted to gain greater visibility into its immediate cloud spending, improve its ability to identify unnecessary cloud consumption and grow its expertise in FinOps, a practice for cloud financial management. It also wanted to improve efficiency through greater use of process automation.

The FinOps Foundation defines the practice as: “An evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.” (link to source)

SoftwareOne began by implementing its Managed FinOps Services to help Alpine get immediate control over its cloud consumption and spending. SoftwareOne has a team of over 200 FinOps Foundation-Certified Practitioners. Leveraging their knowledge, Alpine built its in-house FinOps expertise and learnt how to use and benefit from SoftwareOne’s certified cloud management platform.

SoftwareOne’s FinOps Managed Services are designed to provide organisations with useful intelligence into their cloud software usage and costs. These services use a three-phase framework – inform, optimise and operate – to enable continuous improvement and ongoing cost efficiency. SoftwareOne began by guiding Alpine through an initial workshop and capability assessment to understand the company’s existing FinOps processes, roles and responsibilities. It then established benchmarks to help Alpine achieve its desired level of FinOps maturity and began guiding stakeholders across the business in how to right-cost and right-size their cloud environments.

To ensure that Alpine would eventually be able to manage its own FinOps practice, SoftwareOne also helped key people across the organisation learn how to implement optimisation strategies, track performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and review budget thresholds, chargebacks, and alerts.