The customer is a healthcare provider supplying mental health and learning disability services. The customer provides care in a range of locations including people’s own homes, specialist clinics, hospitals, low and medium secure units, and GP surgeries.
The Business Challenge
To meet the ongoing sector targets for increased operational efficiency balanced with cost savings, the customer was looking to operate in a more agile way and to be able to increase and decrease (flex) its compute resources and associated charges, without impacting service levels. To do this, they needed to transform from an existing, legacy on-premises compute environment into a cloud service whilst still being able to utilise their existing EA Microsoft licenses and undertake a full migration to a new domain. Most of the estate also required operating system upgrades as part of this transformation.
Budget requirements also had to be met, while ensuring high availability within the core solution and being flexible enough to scale to meet future demands for servers (virtual machines) and storage.
The Solution
Through several complex workshops, the entire estate of more than 300 servers was reviewed and reclassified to either be re-hosted, rebuilt, re-architected, or decommissioned. The level of resilience required for each workload was also assessed.
After this review, options for public cloud (Microsoft Azure), community cloud (Daisy Flex), and private cloud were assessed and commercially validated.
The joint conclusion was to move to the community cloud via Daisy’s Flex 2 solution to deliver against the customer’s licensing, scalability, availability, and budgetary requirements. Delivered via a hosted, managed services solution, the customer’s core compute infrastructure of servers, (considered to be its “crown jewels”) was transformed into Daisy’s community cloud, split 50/50 between its sites. This approach was taken for risk mitigation so that in the unlikely event of catastrophic failure, only 50% of the customer’s critical data would need to be transferred to and run from an alternate location. To facilitate the decommissioning process, an interim transitional platform was also provided for the initial nine months of the contracted period to mitigate any issues.
The customer’s existing Unified Communications (UC) environment was also transformed and upgraded onto the Flex2 platform as it had reached the end of its serviceable life on an old, dedicated platform. As part of the overhaul, the customer’s Mobile services were also renewed.
The Results
Through the new solution, which built on an existing, successful partnership with Daisy, the customer has exceeded its stated aims of agility in the delivery of its core compute ensuring flexibility, scalability, and resilience whilst not compromising on security. The added advantage was being able to utilise existing licensing and ensure that its commercial goals could also be achieved and managed effectively going forward, without the risks associated with pure-play consumption-based services.
Going forward, working with Daisy, the customer is now planning to transform its means of communicating with both staff and patients, maximising the possibilities and functionalities of Microsoft Teams, and transferring phone systems off traditional PSTN lines and onto Internet-based alternatives ahead of the PSTN Switch-off in 2025.
