Accelerating HealthEquity’s Cloud Journey with Silk

Silk recently interviewed Mervyn Lally, CIO at HealthEquity, to discuss the company’s strategic initiatives to modernize its technology stack and migrate to Microsoft Azure, with the help of Silk. HealthEquity, a leading administrator of health savings accounts (HSAs) and other consumer-directed benefits such as flexible savings accounts, COBRA, and commuter benefits, is making significant advancements to ensure its platforms are both responsive and efficient.

Embracing the Cloud

HealthEquity is in the process of evolving its technology stack by moving its platforms to Microsoft Azure. This includes the main business platform that manages HSA transactions on HealthEquity.com. These applications are directly used by employees of the companies HealthEquity supports and experience substantial demand spikes based on the nature of benefit cycles. Given the high visibility of these applications, it’s imperative to ensure they are responsive without overprovisioning resources.

However, during testing, some applications struggled to perform optimally on Azure, resulting in latency issues that could impact customer wait times. Lally emphasized the importance of finding a solution: “We had a decision to make based on our migration to the cloud. We performed extensive load testing, and once we confirmed throughput with Silk, we committed to the cloud migration.”

Introducing Silk

Silk provided the key to overcoming these challenges. With Silk, HealthEquity achieved 5x faster performance compared to native Azure Ultra Disk, with latency consistently below 0.5 milliseconds. Additionally, the company realized 36% cost savings due to Silk’s data lifecycle management. Lally noted, “The feedback I received from my team was, wow, this really works.”

First Impressions and Results

The initial performance gains were remarkable. Lally recalled his team’s reactions: “They didn’t believe that you could scale this way in the cloud. They were amazed with their first interactions with Silk, their team, and their technology.”

Silk quickly became a crucial component and a key success factor in HealthEquity’s cloud migration. “We would not be able to do our lift and shift and start our modernization without Silk,” Lally stated. “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.”

The Value of Silk

For organizations with mission-critical databases that need to perform in the cloud, Lally has clear advice: “If you have a database and you need it to perform in the cloud, and it is mission critical, you most likely need Silk. Silk’s support to our business has been nothing but fantastic.”

A Phenomenal Partnership

The partnership between Microsoft, Silk, and HealthEquity has been instrumental in achieving HealthEquity’s cloud objectives. Lally praised this collaboration, highlighting how Silk has enabled the company to leverage the promise of the cloud without needing to rewrite applications. “In our cloud journey, Silk has really helped us take advantage of the promise of the cloud but do it without having to rewrite the application. Taking advantage of the thousands of man hours that went into building that application, get it running on the cloud, have it adjacent to all the cloud-native technologies, and be able to leverage those over time.”

Looking Ahead

As HealthEquity continues to evolve its applications and products, including the integration of new features and AI, Silk remains a cornerstone of its cloud strategy. “As we rapidly evolve our data sets, that’s all made possible by the promise that Silk brings in terms of cloud adoption,” Lally concluded.

The journey of HealthEquity illustrates how Silk can significantly enhance cloud migration, ensuring performance, cost-efficiency, and the ability to capitalize on cloud-native technologies for future growth.