Cloud Infrastructure, along with two screens
On February 25, 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded Softrams a 5-year contract to provide software services to support the Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics & Supplies (DMEPOS) competitive bidding system (DBidS). The team was charged with designing infrastructure for autoscaling, with updates to include Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS). Additionally, they were also charged with enhancing security and ensuring fault tolerance and disaster recovery through building infrastructure in AWS Fargate.
In a short time, the team has already made considerable progress by utilizing modern technology. By September 2021, the Softrams team completed a four-month effort of shifting the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based DBidS application infrastructure to a fully managed AWS ECS (Elastic Container Services) running in Fargate. This provides strong security isolation between containers, ensuring the latest security updates are running, and provides the ability to set granular access permissions for every container. The newly implemented architecture also provides very high availability of DBIDS system to the end user.
An important consideration for every company is saving money, while growing and scaling their business. With IaaS there is much needed flexibility and security options for a successful and cost-efficient operations and maintenance on the DBidS program. IaaS also reduced maintenance expenses (AWS hosting expenses) and horizontal scaling allows the addon of more nodes if additional computing power is needed. Supplementary benefits are realizing the benefit of immutable infrastructure, where deployment is simpler and more predictable. IaaS has become increasingly popular and with all the benefits listed above, it will continue to gain more champions.
We have also adapted to a serverless infrastructure, which facilitates the resolution of multiple security vulnerabilities that were inherited previously. Our team has been able to address over 3,000 security findings by implementing new infrastructure which speaks volumes in terms of identifying gaps and mitigation strategies to overcome these risks.
The Softrams team is proud to share the advancement we have achieved on our DBidS program, and we look forward to accomplishing even more.
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