Customer Spotlight: Acoer
Acoer provides healthcare organizations rich, relevant, interoperable, out of the box RESTful APIs which serve as the internal gearing to build modern healthcare applications that are transparent and trustworthy. Jim Nasr, Acoer’s CEO, sees the company’s role similarly to that of the internal movement makers in the watch industry – offering unfailingly reliable internal mechanisms which companies can use as the building blocks for higher-level apps.
Acoer’s solutions address two huge problems in healthcare:
First, the healthcare industry is notoriously opaque – sometimes by design – but Acoer provides solutions to visualize and analyze mountains of raw medical data, distilling clear insights from fuzzy, complex datasets.
Second, Acoer builds on the Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger to establish computational trust for each level of transaction so that their customers can trust the data’s validity and authenticity.
In one sense, customer requirements for Acoer’s APIs are simple: they must “just work” at all times. But the size and complexity of each client, along with geographic and regulatory nuances, often make delivering fault-tolerant solutions extraordinarily difficult. A customer may, for instance, require dedicated vs shared infrastructure and/or need multiple geographic regions on multiple clouds but stipulate the exclusion of certain geographies in order to meet regulatory requirements.
Nasr is no stranger to complex infrastructure, having previously built and maintained large-scale AWS and Azure environments in his former job as Chief Software Architect for the Centers for Disease Control. Under his leadership, Acoer built their initial infrastructure in AWS EKS but this required their best application engineers to spend time on DevOps.
This level of investment and resource allocation was necessary but sub-optimal. Nasr knew that every day his top developers spent elbow-deep in EKS administration meant a feature left unfinished.
“Cloud cost is always a consideration, but the indirect costs were our real concern – the cost of redoing work and having key developers spend 20% of their time on DevOps. Control Plane allows us to optimize both direct and indirect cloud costs.”
When Nasr found Control Plane in early 2021, he immediately saw how it could help Acoer take their infrastructure to the next level of resiliency while at the same time reducing the DevOps burden on their engineering team.
Acoer products and services now run on Control Plane with the flexibility to create dedicated or shared environments that are running on the clouds and cloud regions required by each client.
As an example, Acoer's RightsHash service (a decentralized software engine to represent rights and protections) runs on Control Plane utilizing seven geographical regions spread across three different clouds. This distributed architecture ensures that the API is always available even if a region or an entire cloud goes down.
Ordinarily, this type of multicloud architecture would be very complex and costly to build and maintain, but with Control Plane, Acoer has the flexibility to create and configure single-cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid infrastructure very simply and straightforwardly.
Since Control Plane is built to enable multicloud deployments by default, Acoer is able to increase fault tolerance without increasing cloud spend or DevOps resources.
Not only does Control Plane help to increase the resiliency of Acoer’s infrastructure, utilizing the Control Plane platform helps to increase fault tolerance across Acoer’s engineering team as well. Acoer’s engineers can deploy and manage workloads on Control Plane easily, eliminating the need for a specialized middleman who might or might not be available. Enabling Acoer’s engineers to operate independently speeds up the pace of innovation.
“I would have had to hire a dedicated DevOps engineer – maybe two – in order to get the same level of sophistication we get from Control Plane out of the box.”
Acoer is enabling increased transparency and trustworthiness in the healthcare industry by acting as one of the industry’s “movement makers” - offering highly fault tolerant API-based gearing for higherlevel apps. In the same way Acoer’s customers trust them for always-on reliability, Acoer trusts Control Plane to provide multicloud infrastructure as a service – freeing them to focus on customer value.