Planet DDS reimagined its provisioning process by moving from an on-premises, hardware-bound model to a cloud-based model on Microsoft Azure.

Previously, bringing on a large enterprise customer meant:

• Ordering, shipping, installing, and configuring physical hardware
• Waiting over six weeks if hardware was delayed or unavailable
• Overprovisioning infrastructure as a precaution

By standardizing on Azure, Planet DDS can now:

• Provision only the resources each customer actually needs
• Spin up environments on demand instead of waiting for hardware
• Scale up during business hours and scale down overnight to control costs

As a result, the team can provision even large enterprise DSOs in about one day, instead of several weeks. This shift has also contributed to an estimated 40% reduction in total cost of ownership, since the company no longer maintains extensive physical infrastructure and benefits from Azure’s managed, metered model.

Planet DDS used Azure to reshape its platform around performance and reliability, which are critical for DSOs running hundreds or thousands of locations.

Key improvements include:

• Faster application performance: By using Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB as a unified data layer for multi-tenant workloads, Planet DDS reports roughly 30% faster application response times across customer environments.
• Built-in high availability and resilience:
  • Multi-region deployment on Azure eliminates single points of failure.
  • Databases were rearchitected with availability groups and automatic failover.
  • If a database instance or region fails, workloads automatically shift to another node or region, with no manual intervention.
• Faster recovery: Recovery times that used to be measured in hours are now measured in minutes, with what the team describes as “instantaneous recovery” from the engineering perspective.

For DSOs and their patients, this means:

• Reduced risk of multi-hour outages that can disrupt appointments
• More consistent performance across all locations
• Greater confidence in system availability—critical when a patient shows up and expects their provider’s systems to be up and running

These reliability gains also strengthen Planet DDS’s position in enterprise sales conversations, where architecture, availability, and disaster recovery are now central topics.

Azure allowed Planet DDS to rethink both its release process and its cost model.

Deployment speed and flexibility

• Before Azure, deployments were tied to on-premises infrastructure limits.
• Releases often required downtime and were scheduled for late-night or off-hours windows.

With Azure App Service and modern CI/CD practices, Planet DDS now:

• Uses staging slots to test new versions in production-like environments without impacting users.
• Deploys during normal business hours instead of “midnight deploys.”
• Has accelerated deployment cycles by about 75%, enabling faster delivery of new capabilities.

Cost optimization and scalability

• In the on-premises model, scaling required planning, procurement, and installation of hardware.
• Capacity was often overprovisioned to avoid shortages, driving up fixed costs.

On Azure, Planet DDS can:

• Scale infrastructure up during busy clinic hours and down overnight.
• Pay only for the resources actually used, rather than 24/7 hardware capacity.
• Operate on a managed, metered model that has helped reduce total cost of ownership by about 40%.

According to leadership, keeping hosting costs down as a percentage of revenue is now a recurring board-level discussion, and Azure is a key enabler of that ongoing optimization.