Healthwise enhances Hybrid IT strategy with Pulse Secure vADC and Microsoft Azure
October 2018 by Marc Jacob
Pulse Secure announced that Healthwise has successfully deployed Pulse Secure virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC), to improve the performance and reliability of its web applications within Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
Healthwise, a provider of health content and patient education, selected Pulse Secure vADC to deliver application-aware optimization for its virtualised development and application environments that are rapidly moving to the cloud as part of a hybrid IT strategy.
Healthwise is a non-profit organization with a mission to help people make better health decisions. People have turned to Healthwise information more than 2 billion times to learn how to do more for themselves, ask for the care they need, and say “no” to the care they don’t need. Healthwise partners with hospitals, electronic medical record (EMR) providers, health plans, care management companies, and health websites to provide up-to-date, evidence-based information to the people they serve.
Information technology plays a critical role in delivering on the Healthwise mission. Healthwise develops and maintains around 50 custom applications which have been recently migrated to the Microsoft Azure cloud environment to leverage platform as a service benefits that improve operational efficiency and drive down costs.
Healthwise has deployed several virtualized application clusters on Microsoft Azure with each instance controlled by a Pulse Secure vADC appliance which provides load balancing, and SSL/TLS offload with HTTP optimization to improve application performance.
Studer highlights three examples; the first is when his team built its own real-time monitoring tool using the APIs that allowed it to integrate with their existing monitoring and alerting platform to display high level network and applications metrics in a single view that would traditionally have required manually gathering reports from multiple systems.
In another example, the scripting helped Healthwise to manage the upgrade process from the unsecure TLS 1.0 to the newer TLS 1.2 standard for partners that connect to its applications.