Summary
AMN Healthcare, a leader in total talent solutions for healthcare organizations, faced significant bottlenecks in their software development lifecycle due to manual data management processes.
By implementing Perforce Delphix, the organization transformed its development and testing environment by replacing labor-intensive data workflows with streamlined, self-service capabilities. This shift empowered developers, ensured rigorous data compliance, and delivered the organizational efficiency required to maintain a competitive DevOps edge.
Challenge: The Burden of Manual Test Data Management
For AMN Healthcare, maintaining the integrity and security of patient data is paramount in order to iterate quickly, improve release cadence, and respond to changing business needs effectively. However, the organization’s commitment to innovation was being hampered by a legacy approach to managing and securing data in non-production environments.
The process of testing back-end software was characterized by:
- Resource-Intensive Workflows: Refreshing data environments was a manual undertaking that required the coordinated effort of multiple people over five to seven days, including database administrators (DBAs) and system administrators.
- Security & Compliance Risks: To protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII), teams relied on manual conversion scripts to identify and obfuscate sensitive data. This manual intervention increased the risk of human error and compliance vulnerabilities, which led to data that lacked referential integrity by not being sufficiently representative of production data. This lack of reliable data caused software defect risks.
- Operational Bottlenecks: The reliance on manual execution meant that developers and QA testers spent valuable time waiting for environments to be ready, rather than focusing on high-value development and testing tasks.
To scale effectively and align with DevOps goals, AMN Healthcare needed a solution that would not only reduce the time and resources required for refreshes but also foster a more agile development pipeline. By prioritizing automation, efficiency, and data privacy, the organization sought to enable faster releases and seamless collaboration across teams, laying the groundwork for a streamlined DevOps strategy.
Solution: Elevating Data Operations to Scale Enterprise Velocity
AMN Healthcare selected Perforce Delphix to modernize its data operations. The test data management solution aligned perfectly with Perforce's mission to help enterprises move beyond coding speed alone to achieve true cross-functional efficiency, software quality, and stronger governance.
Perforce Delphix addressed the core challenges through:
- Automated Data Profiling and Masking: The platform automatically profiled data to identify sensitive information and applied masking algorithms. Non-production environments were then populated with realistic but secure data. This automated data profiling and masking eliminated the need for manual obfuscation scripts, as well as ensured the higher data quality needed to achieve better software quality.
- Developer Self-Service: By putting control directly with developers, Perforce Delphix moved data-refresh responsibility closer to the point of development. Developers gained the autonomy to refresh environments on demand, which both increased their productivity and reduced reliance on DBAs and SysAdmins.
- Streamlined Infrastructure: The solution optimized storage usage and reduced infrastructure and resource costs by lowering the sheer number of manual steps required to spin up testing environments.
Results: Delivering the DevOps Edge
The implementation of Perforce Delphix delivered immediate, tangible outcomes that extended beyond individual developer productivity to organizational resilience.
1. Faster Application Development
The transition from manual to automated processes dramatically reduced the time, cost, and resources required for environment refreshes. AMN Healthcare both sped up their development efforts and freed up the technical talent needed to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive maintenance.
2. Strengthened Compliance and Trust
With automated data masking, the organization can now confidently ensure data security in non-production environments. The automated approach eliminates the variability of manual scripts, ensuring that PII is consistently protected across the development lifecycle. It provides realistic, compliant data that supports software quality.
This consistency is especially reassuring in the age of AI and rapid development, as enterprises increasingly need rigorous governance.
3. Improved Cross-Functional Agility
The most profound shift occurred within development teams themselves, allowing them the autonomy to manage their own data needs.
- Self-Sufficiency: Developers can refresh environments on demand, significantly accelerating iteration cycles.
- Increased Satisfaction: Teams are consistently impressed by the speed of refreshes compared to legacy methods.
- Focus on Quality: Empowered with high quality, yet compliant data, QA testers and developers can focus on validating software quality rather than managing infrastructure constraints, with the peace of mind that their data is secure.
Bottom Line
AMN Healthcare’s adoption of Perforce Delphix shows how elevating core data operations can achieve outsized business impact. By automating critical processes and embedding masking directly into the workflow, this organization turned a long-standing bottleneck into a true accelerator for the business.
Perforce Delphix not only strengthened their data compliance posture but also enabled a new level of agility across teams. This transformation shows that when developers are equipped with enterprise-grade tools, the entire organization gains a meaningful competitive advantage.
Gain Your DevOps Edge with Delphix
With Delphix, your teams experience 58% faster time to develop an application and gain $8.4 million in additional revenue from improved software development productivity*. See for yourself why the Delphix DevOps Data Platform is chosen by organizations like AMN Healthcare to gain a DevOps edge. Request a custom demo to get started.
*IDC Business Value White Paper, sponsored by Delphix, by Perforce, The Business Value of Delphix, #US52560824, December 2024