Zeiss FORUM on AWS

Move your Zeiss FORUM server off the hardware in your back room and into the cloud — on AWS, in the region of your choice, with patient data staying in your jurisdiction, and without disrupting your clinic.

This is an infrastructure service. Your FORUM software, your Zeiss license, your Zeiss support relationship, and your clinical workflow stay exactly the same. The only thing that changes is where the server runs.

Why move FORUM to the cloud?

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On-prem FORUM servers work — until they don’t. When yours fails, the clinic doesn’t run. You wait for IT to arrive on site, work out whether the problem is hardware or software, source a replacement part if it is, and try to have FORUM back up before the next morning’s patients arrive. Cancelling a clinic — even for a few hours — is disruptive and expensive.

Moving FORUM to AWS changes that:

• No more clinic hardware to maintain, back up, or replace. Your imaging archive lives in Amazon S3 with 99.999999999% durability. Your FORUM server runs on virtual hardware that can be resized or replaced in minutes.
• Failures handled remotely, not in your back room. AWS handles the underlying hardware; CloudKeep handles the server. When something needs attention, it’s diagnosed and fixed without anyone driving to your clinic.
• Remote access for you and your associates. Review studies from home or another clinic through a secure VPN. No more driving in after hours.
• Data stays in your jurisdiction. We deploy to whichever AWS region matches your data-residency needs — ca-central-1 (Montreal) for Canadian clinics, us-east-1 for US clinics, or any other region you specify. Your imaging data doesn’t cross borders you don’t want it to.
• Audit-ready by default. Every access to a patient image is logged, with seven-year retention — the discipline that HIPAA, PHIPA, and PIPEDA all expect.

“But isn’t AWS expensive?”

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If you have run the AWS pricing calculator, you may have come away thinking it’s prohibitively expensive. You’re not wrong about the calculator — the default configuration (a high-end server running 24/7 on standard storage) can be very costly.

The math changes when the architecture matches how a clinic actually uses FORUM:

• Your FORUM server runs on clinic hours, not 24/7. We schedule it to shut down automatically evenings, weekends, and holidays. Compute cost is cut roughly in half before you notice.
• Your imaging archive tiers itself. Newer studies stay on fast storage; older studies migrate to much cheaper storage — without changing how FORUM sees them.
• No more hardware refresh cycle. No $10K server to buy every few years, no warranty to renew.

Getting this combination right is most of what we do. The AWS parts are public; knowing how to combine them so the monthly bill makes sense for a small-to-medium clinic is the work.

What you get

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A turnkey Zeiss FORUM environment on AWS, built around your practice:

• Your own AWS account, fully isolated, fully yours. Not a shared tenancy.
• FORUM server on a Windows virtual machine, sized for your study volume.
• Imaging archive on Amazon S3, with automatic cost tiering — newer studies on fast storage, older studies on deeper, cheaper storage, without you having to think about it.
• Site-to-site VPN from your clinic network to AWS, so Zeiss devices and workstations connect exactly the way they do today.
• Remote access VPN for doctors working from home.
• Complete audit trail of every patient-data access.
• Monitoring and alerting on the health of your server and network.
• Responsive support during clinic hours. When something needs attention — a VPN hiccup, a Windows update that misbehaved, a Zeiss software question to coordinate with Zeiss support — we handle it so your staff doesn’t have to.

Zeiss support installs and configures FORUM exactly as they would on-prem. We handle everything around it — the network, the storage, the server, the security, the monitoring, and the cutover.

How it works

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1. Free assessment. A 30-minute call to understand your clinic, your devices, your data volume, and your timeline. You leave with a clear picture of what migration would look like for your practice.
2. Build and stage. We build your AWS environment and migrate your historical archive in parallel with your current setup — your on-prem FORUM keeps running untouched.
3. Cutover. A scheduled evening cutover, performed during off-hours. FORUM’s built-in forwarding means rollback is a matter of changing IP addresses — there is no “point of no return.”
4. Ongoing. Your environment stays monitored and maintained. Costs, patches, and changes are all transparent.

What clients are saying

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Beyond how smoothly the process was, I am extremely pleased with the uptime reliability of our FORUM AWS server and my FORUM server headaches are now gone. The flexibility has been an incredible bonus; Shinichi has been optimizing the cost-to-compute ratio to deliver the speed we need at the lowest monthly cost.

— Dr. Matt Regan, Moose Jaw Ophthalmology (Saskatchewan)

Read the case study →

About CloudKeep

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CloudKeep is an independent AWS consultancy led by Shinichi Urano, PhD — a physicist turned software engineer with over seventeen years of hands-on AWS experience. We specialize in small-to-medium organizations. When Zeiss introduced us to Dr. Matt Regan’s practice in Saskatchewan, we migrated his entire FORUM environment to AWS — and we’ve been refining the approach since.

We’re not a FORUM SaaS provider, and we’re not a replacement for the Zeiss software you already own. We’re an AWS engineering shop that runs your existing FORUM server on cloud infrastructure — in whichever AWS region you need.