Oviva: improving Europe's health with digital behavior change therapy
About Oviva
Oviva's mission is to provide the most accessible and effective care to people living with weight-related conditions. Founded in Switzerland in 2014, Oviva combines individual coaching with an intuitive app and has already treated over 300,000 patients in Switzerland, Germany, the UK, and France.
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Contact usOviva's move to the cloud was initially impeded by Germany's healthcare regulations. The Sovereign Cloud allowed Oviva to unify its systems in Google Cloud while complying with Germany's regulations.
Google Cloud results
- Sovereign Cloud enables Oviva to unify infrastructure in Google Cloud
- Outages reduced from every other month to none since migration
- The time we spent to develop the system integrations went down by two thirds
- Debugging time down from hours a week to almost zero
Oviva meets German regulations with the Sovereign Cloud
Obesity is on the rise in Europe, with 60% of adults and a third of children in the region now classed as overweight or obese. Among the drivers of this growing public health challenge, according to the World Health Organization, are meal-delivery apps and the rising popularity of online gaming.
However, with its app-guided therapy to improve the eating and lifestyle habits of its patients, Oviva is proving that digital technology can also be part of the solution to Europe's growing obesity problem.
"Our mission is to provide the most accessible and effective care to people living with weight-related conditions," says Alessa Blatter, Marketing Manager at Oviva. "With our technology, patients can chat with their dieticians, log their meals, track their weight, or participate in learning modules. Our patients tell us that with the app it's much easier for them to stay motivated and reach their weight goals."
A system divided across sovereign states
Since Oviva was founded in 2014, the company has grown rapidly. However, the more Oviva grew, its on-premises architecture faced challenges in keeping up with the increasing demands of the hundreds of staff and medical practitioners working on the platform or the growing number of patients using its app.
Compounding this problem were the fragmented regulations surrounding digital healthcare in Europe, which meant that Oviva didn't have just one on-premises data center, but three. One in Switzerland, for storing the infrastructure for the bulk of its daily operations. Another separate Swiss data center for its first fully digital health app, Oviva Direkt (which was created for the German market). And one in France, for its growing French market. Ideally, Oviva wanted to move its entire infrastructure to Google Cloud so it could get the stability, scalability, and security its services required.
"We wanted a stable system that's scalable to a level where we don't need to worry about it any more. So we could just grow, knowing that our cloud provider was able to grow with us. Google Kubernetes Engine was the most mature solution on the market."
—Demian Jäger, DevOps Engineer, Oviva"We wanted a stable system that's scalable to a level where we don't need to worry about it any more," says Demian Jäger, DevOps Engineer at Oviva. "So we could just grow, knowing that our cloud provider was able to grow with us. Google Kubernetes Engine was the most mature solution on the market."
However, because of the varying data protection regulations in each country, Oviva was unable to modernize its infrastructure completely. Instead, while Oviva migrated the bulk of its operations to Google Cloud, the French and German regulations forced it to maintain it on-premise for those markets.
It was an imperfect solution. On the one hand, Oviva gained stability for its main platform. On the other hand, its architecture remained split into three parts, reducing efficiency, while the reliability issues with the remaining on-premises solutions continued. Six months later, Oviva was finally able to migrate its French operations to Google Cloud, when the French regulator was satisfied that its data sovereignty expectations would be met. However, the infrastructure for Oviva Direkt remained on premises, and the system-management challenges persisted.
"On the stability front, significant improvements have been achieved," Jäger explains. "We used to have occasional outages, but we haven't had a large interruption in the year and a half since we migrated. At the same time, we had this separate setup that was really expensive to maintain. It required special handling and different access management. It was a pretty difficult situation back then."
Regulation meets innovation with the Sovereign Cloud
The answer came in the form of the T-Systems Sovereign Cloud powered by Google Cloud. This platform was developed together with partner T-Systems, a European service provider for IT and digital transformation and full subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. The joint platform ensures customers have sovereignty over their data, thanks to encryption controls and external access management, provided by T-Systems from within Europe. For Oviva, it was the missing piece in the puzzle, enabling the company to migrate its remaining systems to Google Cloud and unify its architecture.
"With the move to the Sovereign Cloud, the big advantage is that we now have our entire environment in the same setup," explains Jäger. "That means we're much more productive as a team. If we need to adjust something, we only spend a third of the time we used to, because before we not only had to do everything twice, but we had to spend time making both systems compatible."
With the efficiencies they've gained, Jäger and his DevOps team have been freed up to focus on developing new platform features, instead of working on maintaining the infrastructure.
"With the move to the Sovereign Cloud, the big advantage is that we now have our entire environment in the same setup. That means we're much more productive as a team."
—Demian Jäger, DevOps Engineer, Oviva"Time spent debugging has gone from hours a week to virtually none," says Jäger. "One feature we've been able to develop is a really nice disaster recovery concept that allows us to revert to our initial setup within an hour, in the event of a crash. It would've taken months to implement that before, whereas with Google Cloud it was a couple of weeks."
Security is also improved, as access control is now unified across the whole system. When Oviva was running different setups in different data centers, onboarding and offboarding were arduous manual processes that involved signing employees in and out of various accounts. Now, when someone leaves the company they are signed out of everything automatically, improving system security and saving Oviva teams valuable time.
Peace of mind with a fully managed service
With the reliability that the fully managed Google Cloud infrastructure provides, Jäger now enjoys peace of mind that he didn't experience with the previous setup.
"The nice thing is that I don't need to worry about whether the system is working, or why," says Jäger. "If something doesn't work, the Google Cloud team will figure it out. I don't need to ping anyone in case the authentication doesn't work, because there's enough monitoring happening for them to know what's going on, and how to fix it."
"Google Cloud has given us more time to focus on our actual mission. We're now confident that we're on a platform that can handle all the growth that is coming in the next few years."
—Demian Jäger, DevOps Engineer, OvivaAs a result, Oviva is able to focus on offering its patients effective app-supported therapy to help them to live healthier, happier lives, such as additional digital therapeutics (DTx) interventions for specific indications or weight management programmes. The company also intends to build on the success of the Oviva Direkt app by rolling out a similar offering in other markets. For Jäger, this expansion has been made far easier by the fact that all its architecture is now unified and fully managed by Google Cloud.
"Google Cloud has given us more time to focus on our actual mission," says Jäger. "We're now confident that we're on a platform that can handle all the growth that is coming in the next few years."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Oviva
Oviva's mission is to provide the most accessible and effective care to people living with weight-related conditions. Founded in Switzerland in 2014, Oviva combines individual coaching with an intuitive app and has already treated over 300,000 patients in Switzerland, Germany, the UK, and France.