Leading Healthcare Provider

Our client

M247 had the privilege of working with one of Romania’s leading healthcare companies, operating a chain of clinics, laboratories, pharmacies and hospitals around the country. Founded as a family firm in the 1990s by a pediatric doctor, the company has enjoyed rapid growth and now runs close to 300 sites, including labs and lab test collection centers, clinics and hyper-clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, dentistry centers and a stem cell bank. The company prides itself on the exceptional standard of the services it offers, with a high premium placed on delivering outstanding customer experiences, both online and off.

Customer Challenge

Our client recognised that it was operating an IT infrastructure which, due to rapid growth, it had long since outgrown. All IT services across all sites were being run on legacy servers owned by the company and managed by its internal IT department. It was becoming increasingly obvious that this premises-based server architecture could not provide the agility or scalability the company required to meet its growth ambitions. Redundancy protocols were inadequate and repairs, updates and upgrades to the existing system were taking too long and creating a drain on resources.
In one incident, one of the company’s servers ran out of RAM. It took two days for the supplier to upgrade the server, during which time all internal applications were down, leaving clients unable to access patient medical records or appointments, effectively bringing operations to a standstill. Following this, the management team took the decision to completely overhaul IT provision, seeking a reliable, specialist partner who could deliver a flexible, cost-effective cloud infrastructure solution without disrupting ongoing business operations.

Key points

• Consolidated infrastructure and improved business agility
• Highly scalable environment optimised system performance
• No disruption to end-users during migration
• Dynamic allocation of VM resources
• ISO 27001 security standard and top level redundancy
• 24/7 support 15 minute response SLA for every open ticket

Our solution

In presenting our tender for the contract, M247 understood that a unique, personalised solution was expected by the senior management team to reflect the size and complexity of the company’s operations. We proposed creating a bespoke Private Cloud, migrating key sections of the company’s IT infrastructure to a virtualised VMware platform. This would decouple the IT services the company relied on from physical servers, increasing redundancy and scalability while providing better security and privacy than a so-called public cloud service.

In short, a private cloud is a ring-fenced cloud network used by one client only. Unlike public cloud solutions, it provides completely private connections and single-tenant resources, meaning it can be shaped to provide higher levels of control and defense, better regulatory compliance and enhanced performance. Unlike public cloud platforms, which tend to be ‘out of the box’ products, private clouds are highly customisable and can be tailored to suit the specific needs of a single company. The popularity of private cloud infrastructure solutions has increased rapidly over the past few years globally, including in Romania where M247 has had the privilege of working with several high profile enterprises.

Deployment

Implementation

Our client had been making ongoing investments in its IT solutions for several years previously. This included the relatively recent purchase of multiple servers in a bid to scale up capacity, before further growth pushed the company to take a different direction. It had also invested in a sophisticated CRM system to provide a centralised management solution for the large quantities of patient and operational data that was being generated and handled on a day-to-day basis. The CRM helped to rationalize data sets by relevant categories and streamlined processes, saving time across a range of core activities.

It was important that the private cloud migration carried out by M247 protected these investments and didn’t cause any disruption to current processes. We therefore integrated the company’s own server assets into the private cloud, enabling maximum scalability, optimized performance and resource efficiencies without having to write off the cost of that hardware. For additional data privacy, we applied two layers of system security, which formed a safe, controlled environment without the threat of external intrusion.

Deployment

With all of our migration projects, M247 project teams follow a stable methodology which is founded on the principles of understanding the core business challenges faced by the client, establishing a technical framework for addressing them, delivering a secure, stable transition with minimal disruption to operations and then supporting the client post-implementation to maximize return on investment (ROI).

In the first instance, this involves carrying out a thorough assessment of all existing applications and servers, including identifying dependencies and analysing configurations. That gives us the knowledge base to plan and deliver the actual migration, and after that it is a case of fine-tuning resources to optimise performance.

Results

The private cloud we built provided the company with the scalability it requires to sustain its growth, which was under threat due to the lack of flexibility in its legacy server architecture. The consolidated company-wide infrastructure plus the dynamic allocation of VM resources means our client is better placed than ever to optimise the customer experience across all parts of the business and respond to changing market demands, while driving efficiency and performance gains throughout its IT systems.

The bespoke hybrid solution we built delivers the highest levels of redundancy and security across both physical and virtual assets. M247 continues to support the company 24/7, with a guaranteed 15 minute response time to all open work tickets, backed up with transparent communication and an ongoing commitment to service.