Health Info Net is modernizing healthcare with Red Hat and VSHN

Health Info Net (HIN) provides digital services such as a private communication infrastructure to healthcare professionals and organizations in Switzerland. When HIN wanted to speed up development cycles and modernize its environment, it needed to comply with stringent compliance requirements while meeting demands for high availability and resiliency. HIN partnered with VSHN to migrate applications to Red Hat OpenShift on 2 sovereign clouds, eliminating vendor lock-in while increasing system resilience. With Red Hat technology, managed services and support from VSHN, and DevOps methodology, HIN has simplified the developer experience, sped up development cycles, and established a foundation to digitize patient records.

Benefits

• Established high levels of compliance
• Improved operational efficiency
• Accelerated deployment and increased scalability

Health Info Net provides IT services, data handling, and encrypted email channels for the Swiss healthcare sector, helping more than 90% of relevant actors communicate securely with patients and other clinicians.

Founded in 1996, HIN has been a key player in healthcare digitization. However, as regulatory and technological requirements in healthcare evolved, the existing infrastructure—which had reliably supported secure communication for many years—reached the limits of its original design. This limitation made it increasingly difficult to scale development processes and introduce new services at the required pace. Developers were increasingly looking for more modern tooling and processes that would allow them to deliver new features faster and work more autonomously.

Working in the healthcare sector also comes with its own challenges, including stringent compliance requirements and the need for stable and resilient systems that clinicians can rely on. “We set the bar high in terms of data. No financial compensation could ever make up for leaked medical information,” said Mohammad Alavi, CTO at Health Info Net. “We also need to comply with Swiss regulations on areas such as data sovereignty.”

HIN’s collaboration with a hosting provider had helped the business to focus on compliance needs in the past. However, it was preventing the organization from setting up self-service developer tools, which meant it couldn’t deploy changes itself or speed up the delivery cycle. Engineers had to submit a ticket and wait more than 2 weeks for changes to be implemented. This delay conflicted with HIN’s desire to adopt a DevOps, shift-left, engineering-led approach. The company also wanted to reduce the number of custom solutions in its environment, which had led to having many patches to manage and update.

HIN decided to fundamentally transform its infrastructure and processes, moving from static physical servers toward a multivendor sovereign cloud architecture. The organization needed a European cloud provider rather than a hyperscaler to comply with GDPR and to protect its data under the US 2018 CLOUD Act. It began looking for an implementation partner and the right technology to deliver greater operational stability, higher resilience, and self-service developer tools.

HIN collaborated with DevOps expert, VSHN, to design and deploy a modern, cloud-native container platform running on 2 Swiss private clouds: cloudscale.ch and Exoscale. This approach provides resiliency across all infrastructure layers while ensuring that sensitive data remains in Switzerland.

“We chose Red Hat OpenShift to meet HIN’s multitenancy requirements,” said Aarno Aukia, Co-founder at VSHN. “The solution provided the right foundation to build out the appropriate architecture— separate from other tenants with access control on top.

”VSHN provides Red Hat OpenShift as a managed service with 24x7 support and 99.99% uptime. It took a day and a half to spin up HIN’s container platform, and once it had the right security-based processes in place, VSHN spent the next 12 months migrating applications.

VSHN focused first on identity and access management (IAM), disaster recovery and replication, and application firewalls. To secure HIN’s web applications and APIs, VSHN deployed Airlock Microgateway, a Kubernetes Gateway API implementation that brings web application firewall (WAF) and identity-aware proxy capabilities directly in the Red Hat OpenShift environment.

Established high levels of resilience and compliance

Deploying Red Hat OpenShift on 2 sovereign clouds helps customers comply with Swiss healthcare regulations to keep sensitive data safe and simplifies audits. HIN is among the first Swiss companies to adopt a zero trust architecture, which will be pivotal as the healthcare sector continues to digitize.

“Healthcare is a cautious industry, but it’s also one that has a real impact on citizens’ lives,” said Aukia. “I am super proud to be working on a project that is close to my heart and will benefit society in the future.”

Increased operational efficiency

Managed services from VSHN make the right tools available on demand, and adopting more automated processes has increased reliability and uptime. The environment is stable, managed, and monitored 24x7 by VSHN to achieve 99.99% availability. By using more cloud-native technologies, HIN’s customers can provide safe and reliable healthcare services to citizens.