DoiT began by evaluating Patients Know Best’s current strengths and opportunities for improvement. One notable concern was the company’s huge scope of work — combined with manual processes and a relatively small staff — which limited its ability to manage periodic activity spikes.

“Monitoring and managing the sheer volume of events and logs within our system manually is impractical given the scale we now operate at,” Varga says. “My strategy was to rely more on automation and tooling, both on the security side and on the FinOps side — machine learning tools, anomaly detection, and other automation that doesn’t require much configuration or interaction from humans because the scarcest resource for us is people.”

So, DoiT’s primary goal was to help the IT staff scale its operation through process automation and clearer reporting by leveraging DoiT’s proprietary technology portfolio and three of its primary capabilities:

• Cloud Analytics: Provides visibility into cloud usage and spend and translates cloud bills into the context needed to drive business decisions.
• Anomaly Detection: Continuously analyzes cloud billing data, alerting users to abnormal cost spikes and providing detailed analytics and reporting to drive the investigation and remediation of any issues.
• BigQuery Lens: Provides Google Cloud users with actionable optimization recommendations along with the ability to drill down into individual usage stats, thus reducing costs through better insights and faster decisions.

In the rare situations where automation alone couldn’t solve Patients Know Best’s specific infrastructure problems, DoiT’s Client Services team has provided additional expertise.

“It happens maybe once a month that we need to deal with more complex infrastructure challenges and have to bring human expertise in to manage the problem,” Varga says. “DoiT’s client services has been great, but overall, the automated dashboard has been more than enough to support our people.” 

DoiT also helped Patients Know Best tackle two additional challenges: finance management and talent development.

From a finance perspective, Patients Know Best had experienced occasional outliers in its business analytics spending due to large and unexpected usage spikes that required it to scale up rapidly. “These spikes in cost were hard to detect,” Varga says. “We knew automation could help, but our internal resources and time constraints prevented us from achieving the desired level of monitoring quality independently.”

To give Patients Know Best more visibility, DoiT set up a business intelligence dashboard that offered automated notifications of sudden fluctuations in query costs. “That helped us catch problems early, so we didn’t need to wait until the next monthly bill to figure out if we had misconfigured something,” Varga says.

DoiT also provided staff training and webinar opportunities to help upskill the Patients Know Best team for heightened in-house cloud management and infrastructure maintenance expertise.