Why choose Oracle?

The CAK faced a choice due to the age of its on-premise hardware: an investment in new on-premise hardware or a transition to a cloud platform. In the case of the CAK, this choice was based on a technical perspective and the need for improvements across various areas of the OHI landscape. Simultaneously with making a decision on a renewed platform, an alternative solution for the CAK's on-premise VMware landscape was also considered. The scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) proved to be the best technical solution. Furthermore, the governing body's long-standing relationship with Oracle reinforced the decision to switch to a new landscape.

Business challenges

The Central Administration Office (CAK) is an independent administrative body governed by public law in the Netherlands. It is charged with statutory administrative tasks in the field of care and welfare, on behalf of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS). A significant part of these tasks involves determining and collecting statutory personal contributions, and for this, the CAK relies on Oracle Health Insurance (OHI) as its primary application.

Result

Based on the reasons mentioned above, the CAK decided to migrate the OHI landscape to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (PaaS/IaaS) platform and combine this simultaneously with the upgrade of the OHI application to the latest version. In light of all the security requirements set by the Dutch government, we joined forces with Oracle to assist the CAK in migrating their OHI applications to the Oracle Cloud. And successfully so; from now on, the CAK is more flexible, secure, and scalable because they are leveraging the benefits of the Oracle Cloud.

By building the Oracle Cloud tenant from scratch, a Terraform-based landing zone certified by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) could be implemented. Network segmentation was achieved by employing a hub-spoke implementation in Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs) and using the appropriate security lists. For application migration and a stable connection, a FastConnect was deployed from the CAK data center to the Oracle Cloud in the Amsterdam region. For MCX's operations, a site-to-site VPN tunnel was configured for management purposes. Both connections are linked to the Dynamic Routing Gateway (DRG) in the Oracle Cloud tenant.

Since the OHI application is a core application within the CAK, it was decided to use Exadata Database Machine X3 to host the OHI databases. We have configured four virtual machine clusters on the Exadata platform. One cluster for the segmented parts of the infrastructure (Development, Test, Acceptance, and Production). Within each cluster, a Container database with multiple pluggable databases has been configured to serve multiple environments within a segment. All web servers for the OHI application based on WebLogic and Forms are installed on compute instances with Oracle Linux, where each web server has a separate mounted block volume.

A load balancer is present within all segmented parts of the infrastructure to handle the request and SSL termination. The load balancers are configured with multiple back-end sets to ensure that the application can be accessed on multiple ports. Application users are unable to reach the web server directly from their client.

Within the Oracle Cloud, all storage and databases are encrypted using customer-managed keys via the hardware security module (HSM) of OCI Dedicated Key Management Service (KSM). All segmented database clusters have their own master key, as do the various storage types used for the web servers.

Object Storage is used as a backup solution for the database clusters to store the backups. The bucket in which the backups are stored is immutable, meaning it cannot be modified; these backups have a retention period of 29 days, which is in accordance with the 30-day retention policy. This backup solution is also used for cloning products to development, test, and acceptance environments. The application backup is stored on the File System Service in the Oracle Cloud and uses snapshots to restore specific files from certain points in time. This makes it possible to restore custom forms when necessary.

The project was a success

With the completion of the migration to OCI and the upgrade of OHI, significant steps have been taken in terms of stability and perspective. Because life cycle management is part of OCI's DNA, management has become simpler for all parties involved. In summary, it was a very successful project!

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