Implementing a solution to migrate hundreds of applications containing sensitive data to the cloud
When a major healthcare insurer approached an IT provider to implement a solution to migrate hundreds of applications containing sensitive data to the cloud, PruTech set out to develop an automated solution that could scale to the task.
Cloud migration is nothing new, but even today virtually every enterprise organization is going through a cloud journey with systems both on-premises as well as in the cloud. That complex architecture makes it necessary to ensure that there are safeguards around how these applications are secured, especially where highly sensitive information is involved like in healthcare environments.
“We all know that we live in a world where external as well as internal threats from an IT standpoint have been rising for the last several years,” said Birender Saini, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Technology Services at PruTech. “Along with that, the need to be compliant with regulatory requirements makes it necessary for enterprise organizations to ensure that data is protected, both to serve customers well, as well as to protect the brand.”
As Saini explained, “Enforcing a fine grain encryption, fine grain tokenization and masking of data can be done in many different ways, but making the changes to the application individually to enforce a functionality like that, as you can imagine, would have taken a huge amount of time.”
PruTech worked with its client to develop an automated solution which was named Secure Database Gateway. It essentially serves as an industry-agnostic ODBC JDBC gateway, which sits in between the application and database and seamlessly enforces the data encryption policies and rules based on who is accessing the data. At the heart of Secure Database Gateway is Progress DataDirect OpenAccess.
Secure Database Gateway enables enterprise organizations to provide fine grain control over individual access to data based on access policies at the enterprise level. The result is the enforcement of enterprise level authorization across different systems and different applications and databases, to ensure that the users that are accessing the data have the business need to know.
“We have been able to build all of this on top of DataDirect OpenAccess, utilizing the database drivers that come with them,” Saini explained. “But even beyond that, we were able to leverage a lot of the best practices and documentation and methodologies from Progress around how the environments are set up and
how the development tools around this component are built.”
“We were also able to leverage a lot of the features and scripts that are available around performance testing and functional testing,” Saini continued. “Our team built a lot of these features on top of what Progress DataDirect provides—and that was really the main reason why we decided to work with Progress.”
Results
In production for three years, Secure Database Gateway is proving its worth when it comes to speeding cloud migration in data sensitive environments.
“At the end of the day, the solution that we were able to build provided great value to our customers,” Saini said. “Our customer was able to accelerate their journey to the cloud, not to mention the fact that they were able to meet the data security and privacy requirements in a consistent manner.
“This significantly reduced the cost,” Saini continued. “It would’ve taken months and months of work, but Secure Database Gateway brought it down to essentially changing one single line within the application to introduce a feature like this. Additionally, speed to market and the centralized management
and monitoring capability also allows this customer to scale the solution from one application to hundreds of applications.”
About PruTech
PruTech is an IT services organization that delivers digital transformation efforts for its clients. PruTech offers IT services around cloud migration, cloud application development, cybersecurity, as well as custom application development.
About Progress
Dedicated to propelling business forward in a technology-driven world, Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) helps
businesses drive faster cycles of innovation, fuel momentum and accelerate their path to success. As the trusted
provider of the best products to develop, deploy and manage high-impact applications, Progress enables
customers to build the applications and experiences they need, deploy where and how they want and manage it
all safely and securely. Hundreds of thousands of enterprises, including 1,700 software companies and 3.5 million
developers, depend on Progress to achieve their goals—with confidence. Learn more at www.progress.com
