HealthEquity Sees 5x Faster Performance and 36% Cost Savings for Business Applications on Azure with Silk

And now for the details.

HealthEquity Overview

HealthEquity administers Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and other consumer-directed benefits for more than 12 million accounts in partnership with employers, benefits advisors, and health and retirement plan providers.

Business Challenges

HealthEquity is in the process of evolving its technology stack by moving its platforms to Microsoft Azure. This includes the company’s main business platform that manages HSA transactions on HealthEquity.com. These applications are leveraged directly by consumers and have substantial spikes in demand based on the nature of the benefits cycle.

Since these applications are highly visible and any latency could impact customer wait time, the team had to ensure they are responsive without being forced to overprovision cloud resources. During testing, the team realized some of the applications were struggling to perform as required on Azure. They needed to find a better way to migrate these applications to the cloud.

Introducing Silk

Silk provides a software platform that optimizes cloud resources to deliver the fastest performance and highest availability while dramatically reducing cloud costs and the complexity of management.

Silk’s software-defined cloud storage provides cloud-native efficiencies for cloud-compatible workloads. By decoupling performance from capacity, Silk provides dramatic performance improvements without overprovisioning, simplifying cloud operations, and reducing long-term costs. In addition, Silk makes it possible for teams to continuously maintain up-to-date copies of production data that enable Dev/Test teams to iterate faster and confidently. These copies are maintained with minimal resource footprint, latency, or cloud cost due to Silk’s snapshot capabilities.

Results

HealthEquity performed extensive load testing on Silk and were able to achieve 5x faster performance compared to native Azure UltraDisk. Silk consistently had latency that was less than 0.5 milliseconds. On top of that, the team saw 36% cost savings due to Silk’s lifecycle management.

According to Mervyn Lally, CIO, HealthEquity: “Silk quickly became a key component and a key success factor to us being able to actually migrate to the cloud. We would not be able to do our lift and shift and start our modernization without Silk. Our monolithic database would not have been able to scale in the cloud. We would have been forced to modernize on-prem, which would have added years to our cloud journey. If you have a database, you need it to perform in the cloud, and it’s mission-critical… you most likely need Silk.”