BDC Cloud Migration: More Capacity, Less Money

The monetary benefits of migrating to the cloud are well-known. When done correctly, cloud migrations can result in a significant savings in resources, maintenance, and real estate expenses. Migrations can also reduce workloads so that projects and applications cost less to run. 

 While these were important considerations in the Master Data Management’s (MDM) recent migration from the Baltimore Data Center (BDC) and away from IBM’s InfoSphere and back-end DB2 database products, one of the biggest reasons why the MDM system team was eager to transition to the cloud is because capacity constraints were limiting the agency’s ability to process additional data domains and manage Identity consolidations. 

“We asked ourselves how can we introduce modernization of cost savings into this process because it’s not something that needs to run 24/7,” said Yousef Shahegh, Director, Division of Data Enterprise Services (DDES). “We saw the cloud as an ideal way to resolve the MDM capacity issue and take advantage of cloud native and open-source tools.  

“MDM basically runs during hours of batch processing. So we identified this initiative as a good candidate for cloud migration because we felt it would provide cost saving as the system harmonizes all the different records that we have for providers, and we were also running out of capacity.”

Today, the MDM’s big bet on the cloud is paying off. Following a successful year-and-a-half migration effort, the MDM is no longer capacity constrained and can process ID resolutions quickly for both Medicaid and Medicare providers and has additional capacity to take on additional providers and beneficiaries. 

By moving to an open-source cloud environment, CMS is saving approximately $2.5 million in annual IBM enterprise licensing fees. In addition, the Master Data Management (MDM) system, which manages ID consolidations, is doing everything in a cloud environment more efficiently and in less time than on the predecessor system. 

The MDM system consolidates multiple provider IDs into a single record. So if a provider has an office in Maryland, one in the District of Columbia, and one in Virginia and Delaware, it consolidates all those listings into one record and says this is the same provider who practices in Maryland, D.C., Virginia and Delaware. 

“We can create one record for that provider so that anybody in CMS that wants to use that Provider or access that provider’s record gets the same answer, not three different records,” Shahegh explains. 

Capacity constraints, which had been limiting the agency’s ability to support additional data domains for some time, are no longer an issue. 

“We wanted to add Medicaid beneficiaries, but we wouldn’t have been able to complete daily processing and updates with the existing architecture,” said Paul Benning, DDES Deputy Director. “So we knew years ago we were hitting a performance limit. Our basic architecture wouldn’t have been able to support additional domains of data.” 

For more information on this Cloud migration contact the MDM team, MDMTeam@cms.hhs.gov.