How Multicloud and Managed Services Protect Uptime in Healthcare

The company’s existing IT environment had grown up largely in AWS, but its next phase required a new Azure-based environment for discount adjudication. Rather than simply adding isolated cloud resources, CDW helped the company build a production-ready foundation from the start.

“We were brought in to design and build out a production, staging and development landing zone with required resources so the company could enable its discount adjudication,” says Sandra Lee, a senior consulting engineer on CDW’s Azure managed services team. “Previously, it had built out some infrastructure in AWS, and the call was made to build this new discount adjudication engine within Azure. So, we were going greenfield, net new.”

The effort included the implementation of a hub-and-spoke topology with a site-to-site VPN and Azure firewall to filter all traffic, as well as Active Directory refactoring and a disaster recovery zone that leverages Azure Site Recovery (ASR). Deployment followed a phased approach, executed in collaboration with an external development team. This included infrastructure setup, application deployment, system configuration and testing.

The result is an Azure environment designed to support the availability, security and manageability requirements of a business-critical adjudication platform. Network traffic within the environment remained private, limiting internet exposure and reducing the attack surface, while ASR supported a 15-minute recovery time objective for critical applications. Because CDW remained involved after the build, the customer is receiving support from engineers who already have an intimate understanding of the environment. 

“The differentiator that CDW brings to the table is that we’re the team that built the infrastructure and is currently managing it,” Lee says. “Not only did we execute on the greenfield, but we continue to have relationships and ongoing meetings to ensure continuity and efficiency. Because we’re the team that built it, we are that much more efficient at managing it.”

71%

The percentage of organizations that now use a multicloud model with resources from more than one public cloud environment

Source: Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report, March 2026

With the new discount adjudication environment built in Azure and portions of the company’s IT environment still hosted by AWS, the organization found itself in need of support for its growing multicloud ecosystem. The company had worked with CDW for years to support its AWS environment and increasingly relies on help from CDW to design new solutions, integrate disparate resources and provide ongoing management across its cloud environments.

“The company wanted to keep up with the market,” says Santhoshkumar Ravi, a CDW principal consultant for AWS managed services. “It wanted to release new features, and to do that, it had to keep enhancing its IT infrastructure. Its people work closely with our team to make those changes and deployments in the production environment.”

This unified approach to IT support proved essential when the company needed to create a secure connection between its Snowflake data environment and both its AWS and Azure environments. CDW suggested implementing a centralized virtual private cloud to host Snowflake endpoints so the company’s AWS and Azure networks could access the environment from a single point of entry. CDW also leveraged AWS’s Private Certificate Authority to offload issuing certificates from the company’s Active Directory servers. 

“Initially, the traffic was going through the internet,” explains Ravi. “We were able to keep all the company’s traffic private, rather than going through the internet and adding that risk.”

Together, the Azure, SQL Server and AWS environments make up a resilient, secure multicloud environment. With most of the initial work complete, CDW has moved into a managed services role, helping the company adapt its environment to evolving needs and respond to acute incidents.

“One advantage of the managed services offering is that it helps to have an educated partner with expertise in niche areas where a company may not have those skill sets,” says Gardner. “Or, it may have someone who can do the work, but it can’t staff around the clock. Our team can either provide a skill set that the company doesn’t have, or we can augment skills that it does have with experts who are always available.”

One evening, Lee received a call from the customer; the VPN was down. Because all discount adjudications have to go through the VPN, this was a revenue-impacting, Priority 1 event. Lee was already familiar with the environment, and so she was able to identify the issue and reset the VPN gateway immediately. She then opened a ticket with Microsoft to find and remediate the root cause. “We were able to get claims going again within the hour,” she recalls.

In another instance, the API keys of one of the company’s users became compromised, creating an urgent risk. CDW’s on-call team immediately suspended the keys and then investigated the root cause. “The customer appreciated that we were very collaborative and made sure the issue was fixed, the root cause was found, and follow-up action items were taken,” Ravi says.

Stakeholders at the company have frequently praised the efforts of the CDW managed services teams. But Gardner says the greatest compliment came in the form of an unanswered email. Halfway through the year, Gardner sent a message to his contacts at the company, asking what CDW could do better, and they never responded.

When Gardner followed up, the stakeholders said they’d seen the note, but they couldn’t think of anything that CDW needed to improve. “I took that as a great win,” Gardner says. “It was one time where it felt great to be ghosted.”