13. Testlet 4
Case study
This is a case study. Case studies are not timed separately. You can use as much exam time as you would like to complete each case. However, there may be additional case studies and sections on this exam. You must manage your time to ensure that you are able to complete all questions included on this exam in the time provided.
To answer the questions included in a case study, you will need to reference information that is provided in the case study. Case studies might contain exhibits and other resources that provide more information about the scenario that is described in the case study. Each question is independent of the other questions in this case study.
At the end of this case study, a review screen will appear. This screen allows you to review your answers and to make changes before you move to the next section of the exam. After you begin a new section, you cannot return to this section.
To start the case study
To display the first question in this case study, click the Next button. Use the buttons in the left pane to explore the content of the case study before you answer the questions. Clicking these buttons displays information such as business requirements, existing environment, and problem statements. If the case study has an All Information tab, note that the information displayed is identical to the information displayed on the subsequent tabs. When you are ready to answer a question, click the Question button to return to the question.
Overview
General Overview
ADatum Corporation is a medical company that has 5,000 physicians located in more than 300 hospitals across the US. The company has a medical department, a sales department, a marketing department, a medical research department, and a human resources department.
You are redesigning the application environment of ADatum.
Physical Locations
ADatum has three main offices in New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The offices connect to each other by using a WAN link. Each office connects directly to the Internet. The Los Angeles office also has a datacenter that hosts all the company's applications.
Existing Environment
Health Review
ADatum has a critical OLTP web application named Health Review that physicians use to track billing, patient care, and overall physician best practices.
Health Interface
ADatum has a critical application named Health Interface that receives hospital messages related to patient care and status updates. The messages are sent in batches by each hospital's enterprise relationship management (ERM) system by using a VPN. The data sent from each hospital can have varying columns and formats.
Currently, a custom C# application is used to send the data to Health Interface. The application uses deprecated libraries and a new solution must be designed for this functionality.
Health Insights
ADatum has a web-based reporting system named Health Insights that shows hospital and patient insights to physicians and business users. The data is created from the data in Health Review and Health Interface, as well as manual entries.
Database Platform
Currently, the databases for all three applications are hosted on an out-of-date VMware cluster that has a single instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2012.
Problem Statements
ADatum identifies the following issues in its current environment:
- Over time, the data received by Health Interface from the hospitals has slowed, and the number of messages has increased.
- When a new hospital joins ADatum, Health Interface requires a schema modification due to the lack of data standardization.
- The speed of batch data processing is inconsistent.
Business Requirements
Business Goals
ADatum identifies the following business goals:
- Migrate the applications to Azure whenever possible.
- Minimize the development effort required to perform data movement.
- Provide continuous integration and deployment for development, test, and production environments.
- Provide faster access to the applications and the data and provide more consistent application performance.
- Minimize the number of services required to perform data processing, development, scheduling, monitoring, and the operationalizing of pipelines.
Health Review Requirements
ADatum identifies the following requirements for the Health Review application:
- Ensure that sensitive health data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Tag all the sensitive health data in Health Review. The data will be used for auditing.
Health Interface Requirements
ADatum identifies the following requirements for the Health Interface application:
- Upgrade to a data storage solution that will provide flexible schemas and increased throughput for writing data. Data must be regionally located close to each hospital, and reads must display be the most recent committed version of an item.
- Reduce the amount of time it takes to add data from new hospitals to Health Interface.
- Support a more scalable batch processing solution in Azure.
- Reduce the amount of development effort to rewrite existing SQL queries.
Health Insights Requirements
ADatum identifies the following requirements for the Health Insights application:
- The analysis of events must be performed over time by using an organizational date dimension table.
- The data from Health Interface and Health Review must be available in Health Insights within 15 minutes of being committed.
- The new Health Insights application must be built on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that will support the high performance of joins on large fact tables.
You need to design a solution that meets the business requirements of Health Insights.
What should you include in the recommendation?