Case Study: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center achieves near-real-time threat detection and 75% faster queries with Microsoft Azure

Strengthening Data Security and Creating More Time for Patient Care

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School, faced slow security-event monitoring that delayed investigations into failed logons and potential data breaches. Hourly reporting, long query times across hundreds of millions of rows, and only 30 days of retained event data meant IT spent precious minutes resolving access issues instead of supporting clinicians and quickly detecting suspicious activity.

BIDMC built a security data warehouse on Microsoft SQL Server 2014, using in‑memory columnstore and In‑Memory OLTP, plus Power Query/Power BI and an HDInsight proof of concept. Query times dropped by up to 75% (e.g., 45s to 10s), update jobs run every five minutes and complete in seconds, daily ingest rose to 5 million records, and retention expanded to 90 days—enabling near‑real‑time breach detection, faster root‑cause analysis, and more time for IT to support patient care.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Ayad Shammout

Director of Data Platform & Business Intelligence