Client
A regional small community hospital, focused on providing personalized patient care and essential health services.
Project Overview
To achieve full cloud modernization on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The primary goal was to accelerate secure application delivery, rapidly provision mission-critical data platforms (like BigQuery), and establish a foundation for automated, continuous DevSecOps that enforces HIPAA compliance by design.
Challenges (Operational & Security Friction)
The client’s legacy operating model was hindering innovation and creating compliance risk:
- Slow Time-to-Market: Reliance on manual infrastructure provisioning and environment setup, leading to development and deployment cycles measured in weeks rather than hours.
- Inconsistent Environments: Significant differences between development, testing, and production environments, resulting in frequent deployment failures and increased debugging time.
- Security-as-an-Afterthought (Compliance Risk): Security and HIPAA compliance checks were performed late in the release cycle, forcing costly rework and failing to proactively enforce crucial controls like data encryption and network segmentation.
- Scalability Constraints: The manual management approach could not scale securely to meet the organization’s growth or the increasing demand for data services.
THE SOLUTION
Emorphis implemented a comprehensive DevSecOps framework built entirely on GCP services, embedding security and compliance from the very first line of code.
Phase 1: Cloud Foundation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Codifying the Environment: We defined all necessary GCP resources—including VPC networks, IAM roles, BigQuery datasets, and Cloud Storage buckets—using Terraform (Infrastructure as Code). This ensures the entire environment is repeatable, version-controlled, and auditable.
- Environment Parity: IaC templates guarantee that development, staging, and production environments are identical, drastically reducing deployment risk.
Phase 2: CI/CD Automation
- Building the Pipeline: Established robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using Cloud Build orchestrated with Cloud Source Repositories. This automated the entire journey: from code check-in, through testing, to deployment of applications and infrastructure changes.
- Zero-Touch Deployment: Automated application updates and infrastructure changes were deployed reliably across the entire GCP footprint with minimal manual intervention.
Phase 3: DevSecOps for HIPAA Compliance (Shift-Left Security)
- Automated Policy Enforcement: We integrated automated security gates directly into the CI/CD pipeline—a “Shift-Left” approach. Before any code was deployed, the pipeline ran checks to confirm:
- Data Encryption: All BigQuery tables and Cloud Storage buckets used for Patient Health Information (PHI) were automatically provisioned with Cloud KMS encryption keys.
- Network Isolation: Deployment of strict network segmentation via VPC Service Controls was mandated and verified via policy-as-code.
- Strict IAM: Required Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, aligned with the least-privilege principle, were automatically enforced for every new resource.
- Continuous Monitoring: Implemented Security Command Center to provide real-time vulnerability management and continuous compliance monitoring, ensuring security posture does not degrade post-deployment.
Benefits
The modern DevSecOps approach delivered transformational results across speed, security, and stability:
- Automated, Continuous HIPAA Compliance: Compliance is no longer a manual checklist but an enforced artifact of the deployment pipeline. This significantly reduced audit preparation time and eliminated compliance drift.
- Accelerated Time-to-Market: Deployment cycles for new features and application updates were reduced from weeks to hours through end-to-end CI/CD automation.
- Operational Stability & Reliability: The use of Infrastructure as Code and automated testing resulted in a 99.9% reduction in deployment-related errors, dramatically increasing system uptime and reliability.
- Cost Efficiency and Scalability: Resources are now provisioned on demand, leading to better optimization of GCP spend. The automated model can easily scale to meet future growth without requiring proportionate increases in IT staff.
TECHNOLOGY
The solution focused on the following core GCP services and tools:
- GCP Cloud – BigQuery, Cloud Storage, VPC Service Controls, Cloud Run / GKE
- DevOps/IaC – Terraform, Cloud Build, Cloud Source Repositories, Cloud Deployment Manager
- DevSecOps – Cloud IAM, Cloud KMS, Audit Logging, Security Command Center
- Data Tools – Dataflow, Cloud Data Fusion (as integrated data pipeline services)
About Emorphis
Emorphis Technologies is a world-class software development and solutions company that truly believes in “Innovation in motion”. Delivery innovation on the go at an accelerated pace has been our success mantra to date. Over the years, we have provided value to our clients in the field of enterprise mobility, cloud, IoT, backend development, Big Data Analytics, and Blockchain.
We serve industries ranging from unicorns and startups to large multinationals in the healthcare, telecommunications, fintech, retail, and publishing industries. Our go-to-market software products – iStatement, iPublisher, and iBuggy have proved our mettle with positive, beneficial customer testimonials. We assist our clients with successful product development, consulting services, and testing (both manual & automated).
We have profound experience & expertise in various technologies like .Net, J2EE, PHP, iOS, Android, and Cloud Computing, viz. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Software QA & testing (Manual & Automation). Our designed products are cloud-ready and can be readily deployed on AWS/Azure cloud infrastructure.
Our pivot on engineering innovation and R&D helps quicken time-to-market, ensuring high quality at economies of scale, delivering cult competency for the global marketplace. We ensure that your ideas, concepts, and requirements are backed by brilliant execution at our end. Having said that, we extend end-to-end ownership of product/application design, development, and deployment.
