Planet DDS cuts provisioning time from six weeks to one day with Azure modernization

Redefining dental software for enterprise scale

As dental support organizations (DSOs) scale to hundreds or thousands of locations, expectations for speed, reliability, and real-time visibility are rapidly evolving across the industry. Many providers still rely on fragmented, desktop-era systems that make it difficult to connect data, support consistent performance, and scale efficiently.

To stay ahead of these shifts, Planet DDS set out to evolve its platform for enterprise growth and better patient experiences. As it expanded, its on-premises environment introduced additional complexity in managing infrastructure, aggregating data, and maintaining consistent performance.

Planet DDS helps dental support organizations move from siloed systems to connected, data-driven operations.

Mike Gibson, Chief Technology Officer at Planet DDS, explains, “As a patient, if you go into the dentist’s office and you’re turned away because their system is down, you may not go back again.” A single infrastructure failure can cause multiple hours of disruption across locations, impacting a significant number of customers.

At the same time, enterprise customers were raising the bar. As Planet DDS began to serve larger organizations, sales conversations shifted from user features to architecture, availability, and disaster recovery.

To continue providing consistent service to DSOs and patients, Planet DDS needed more than incremental improvements. It needed to transform its platform to better meet enterprise expectations for reliability, scale, and innovation.

Moving to the cloud to simplify and unify

Planet DDS chose Microsoft Azure not simply to migrate infrastructure, but to solve a deeper problem: fragmentation. As the company grew through both innovation and acquisition, its environment became increasingly complex. “Having a multi-vendor environment sounds great on paper, but in practice, it fragments operations. With Azure, we can deliver the performance, resilience, and security our enterprise customers expect without the complexity of managing it ourselves,” says Gibson.

The team standardized on Azure to create a single, cohesive foundation. Layered on that foundation was Azure App Service, which replaced IIS-based hosting, enabling consistent, scalable application environments. Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB provided a unified, high-performance data layer for multi-tenant workloads, resulting in approximately 30% faster application response times across customer environments. Nick Orlando, Director of Platform Engineering at Planet DDS, says, “With Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB, we’ve created a unified data layer that delivers the performance and consistency our enterprise customers need across all their locations.”

Microsoft Entra ID centralized identity, access, and security controls across systems, with Microsoft Defender for Cloud strengthening the platform's security and compliance posture. Azure Application Gateway and Azure Front Door delivered global routing, load balancing, and resilience. Microsoft Fabric and analytics services began to unify data across platforms for reporting and future AI use cases.

Building resilience into the platform to address enterprise needs

Reliability was one of the most important drivers of the company’s transformation. In the previous on-premises environment, there was little insulation between a failure and its direct impact on customers.

With Azure, the resilience was built in. Planet DDS deployed its platform across multiple regions, eliminating single points of failure. Databases were rearchitected using availability groups, enabling automatic failover.

With this new enterprise-ready solution, if there is an outage such as a database instance failure, the workloads shift automatically to another node. Running on SQL Database with built-in high availability, failures trigger automatic failover to a secondary instance. If a region experiences issues, customers are moved to another region, with no manual intervention required.

The ultimate result is that the risk of multi-hour outages and associated back-end panic is a thing of the past. Now, Orlando reports, “There’s instantaneous recovery and no panic from the developers’ perspectives or the engineers’ perspectives.”

That reliability is felt beyond the engineering team. In sales conversations with enterprise prospects, Planet DDS can now readily address enterprise-level concerns about high availability being built into the platform’s architecture, data, and recovery model.

From midnight deploys to daylight releases

Before unification, infrastructure often limited how quickly Planet DDS could deliver new capabilities. Deployments required downtime, updates had to be coordinated off-hours, and teams were constrained by the limits of the underlying systems.

Using App Service and modern deployment practices, the team established a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow. New versions of applications can now be deployed using staging slots, which are tested in production without affecting users. As a result, deployment cycles have accelerated by 75%, enabling faster delivery of new capabilities without downtime.

For the development team, Orlando reports on the impact of being able to operate a CI/CD pipeline. “With Azure App Service, it’s night and day. Teams are much happier being able to deploy during business hours and not having to schedule time after midnight to deploy,” he says.

From hardware-bound scaling to on-demand growth

In the former on-premises datacenter model, scaling required planning, procurement, and installation. Expanding capacity was possible, but for provisioning a new customer, ordering, shipping, installing, and configuring the required on-premises hardware could take over six weeks, if the hardware was even available. With the new Azure implementation, Orlando reports that the team can provision even large enterprise customers in just a day.

With that newfound speed, Planet DDS’s growth no longer depends on infrastructure lead times or overprovisioning as a precaution. It only provisions the exact resources needed.

This approach also reduces costs. Instead of the company paying for infrastructure around the clock, the platform scales up during business hours when dental practices are active and scales down overnight. The move to a managed, metered, and right-sized spend with Azure has positively affected the bottom line, reducing total cost of ownership by about 40% while minimizing the costs of maintaining physical infrastructure. As Gibson says, “With Azure, our ability to keep our hosting costs down as a percentage of revenue is something that’s discussed at every board meeting. So it’s critical that we are optimized.”

Creating a foundation for data-driven dentistry

With its infrastructure unified, Planet DDS turned its focus to the data layer and its new AI initiatives.

The platform modernization not only enables more consistent reporting across practices and gives DSOs a clearer, near real-time view into performance, but it also establishes the groundwork for advanced analytics and AI. As Gibson notes, “A clean cloud architecture is a prerequisite for AI. You can’t build on top of a weak foundation.”

What began as a move to modernize infrastructure now helps ensure a consistent, reliable experience for both providers and patients. With built-in resilience and near real-time visibility across locations, dental practices can operate without disruption, reducing the risk of missed appointments and helping patients receive timely care. For an industry still catching up to the cloud, Planet DDS shows what modern, dependable dental care can look like at scale.

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