Our customers share their stories of successful collaboration
Case
Accelerating the cloud transformation with lower risks and clear benefits
GGZ inGeest provides a wide range of mental health services to patients. Cambrian was asked to assess whether the principles and assumptions underpinning their stalled IT modernization plan were still valid and optimal. Based on our advice, and after careful consideration, GGZ inGeest decided to change direction and implement our alternative modernization strategy. In contrast to the original approach, a new architecture and plan reduced the transition risks, created a more robust foundation with an inherently better service quality and provided concrete opportunities for innovation. In addition, landing the new setup in an already certified managed services organisation provided additional assurance and continuity.
"Cambrian brings a combination of innovation and experience to the table. They combine new possibilities with a strong track record. They also understand what it means to take big steps, to make innovations. This really appeals to me."
The customer
GGZ inGeest helps patients with a wide range of services in the field of mental health. It has over 2,000 healthcare professionals offering services at outpatient and inpatient clinics as well as homecare throughout the wider Amsterdam region. Scientific research is also conducted in collaboration with the university of Amsterdam, at locations with a TOPGGz quality mark.
The challenge
When the IT environment of GGZ inGeest needed modernization the organisation decided to invest in another upgrade of workplaces and infrastructure in the existing data centers. Introducing cloud services was deemed unfeasible and a cloud migration was therefore put on the backburner.
When the renewal plan proved arduous and delays started piling up, the new CIO raised several fundamental questions. He asked Cambrian to investigate whether the principles and assumptions underpinning the plan were still valid and optimal.
The planned approach turned out to be riskier and more complex than initially thought due to an accumulated backlog in maintenance and investments and an underestimated technical debt. In addition, without significant changes to the scope of the program, the day-to-day accessibility, support and performance issues their healthcare professionals were facing would not be resolved. This would be a costly omission in an industry plagued by resource shortages and productivity leakage.
Another growing concern were the information security requirements imposed by the healthcare supervisory authority (IGJ). This governing body had set a timeline to comply with NEN 7510 (ISO 27799) and with the existing plan, the risk of missing this target was considerable.
Finally, it also became clear that the proposed architecture was not agile enough to facilitate important, planned developments in their healthcare practices: new working methods, further digitisation and e-health.
The solution
In contrast, a direct transition to cloud services turned out to be feasible. Not through a straightforward lift & shift approach but by introducing innovative PaaS services. A key element in the alternative plan was to retire the digital workplace based on Remote Desktop Services and replace this with Amazon Appstream 2.0 enabled access to their core systems.
The alternative architecture was complemented with components that were already used successfully elsewhere in healthcare – such as Chrome-based mobile workstations and elegant SaaS solutions for identity management, office automation and secure device management. The network was also simplified with the introduction of a SD-WAN built with modern network components, contributing to a much lower TCO.
Supported by the results of several POCs and reference checks, GGZ inGeest decided to change course and implement the alternative modernisation strategy.
The results
The comparison of the new architecture with the original program yielded positive results: lower transition risks, inherently better quality and plenty of concrete opportunities for innovation.
Several critical components of the new architecture – such as Amazon Appstream 2.0 to host and stream the existing electronic health records system to users – were tested and fine-tuned in production by healthcare professionals in various departments and locations prior to the large scale roll out. They experienced a clearly noticeable performance improvement, helped fine tune the transition runbooks and acted as change agents advocating the new way of working to the rest of the organisation.
After the comprehensive transition, our ISO 27001 and ISO 27799 certified managed services were onboarded:
- The organisation’s first line support team was backed and supported by our managed services team.
- Our managed services team maintained the AWS IT environment, and orchestrated the new third party service providers.
- ITSM integrations and automated workflows ensured that service issues and requests were processed efficiently, and backed by SLAs.
- Industry required information security controls (ISO 27799) were implemented and monitored.
The new approach and setup also yielded positive results with regard to the financials. The stark simplifications across the architecture resulted in much lower operating costs. The number of servers to be managed was reduced substantially, and much less effort was required to manage and support the robust cloud services. An important additional consideration: after this transition, the organisation no longer needs to invest in periodic, substantial lifecycle renewals and instead will be using flexible pay-per-use cloud services.
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