Understanding the unique IT needs of any industry takes years of experience and careful attention. For Joel Tulloch, Founder of Stoic IT, it’s part of a twenty year journey through a wide range of IT roles across the healthcare industry – from small operations to national health services and hundred million dollar health businesses – that led to forming his own IT services company dedicated to this important niche.
“The level of IT budget to headcount is a massively higher ratio than an average business,” says Tulloch. “Some customers can have more servers than people. But compared with other equipment they need, like MR and CT in radiology, a few hundred thousand spent on servers is a drop in the bucket – and absolutely critical to the place functioning appropriately.”
As part of his development of Stoic IT, Tulloch has seen AWS as a “broader and stronger” cloud platform for the needs of his clients, while enjoying the transparency of its cost structures so he can feel comfortable clients know exactly what they’re paying for.
After finding AWS to be a natural fit for his own way of approaching cloud architecture for his clients, Tulloch became a Certified Solutions Architect along the way to deepen his expertise with the platform. Whether it’s reserving instances or running services, running services for eight hours a day, or simply on demand, Tulloch feels confident he’s able to maximise performance while minimising cost for his clients through AWS tools and services.
One common need among Stoic IT clients is image content services, with AWS suiting client scale and budget needs while delivering performance improvements of as much as 300%.
Specialist Software Challenges
While Stoic IT has helped its clients to transform to the cloud, Tulloch sees the greatest challenge in healthcare is managing specialist software vendors.
“It’s something of a captive market, so support and assistance from vendors outside the health industry is generally higher than it is within,” says Tulloch. “It can be hard to get some vendors running in the cloud, but the focus on security, privacy, performance and availability that AWS can help with can be so valuable.”
What sets Stoic IT truly apart, according to Tulloch, is their willingness to show their clients how they can take non-cloud software solutions and make it run in the cloud to unlock the benefits of the cloud where needed.
Ready For The Worst
Australia has seen far too many natural disasters in recent years. With the constant threat of floods and fires across the continent, and some towns ravaged more than once, Stoic IT sees an important role for cloud architecture in keeping healthcare systems operational when those terrible events arrive.
“If you’re in multiple locations, do you want any of those issues stopping you from working entirely? We find some simple business continuity discussions help point to long term viability of a business as a big factor in a cloud move – with growth and flexibility as an added bonus,” says Tulloch.
Through AWS, Stoic IT has improved 65% of customer BC/DR solutions with only small opex spends, with data protected through Veeam and S3 at an average of just 20TB per customer.
Partner Guidance
Working with Ingram Micro as their AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Stoic IT has found that having an extra set of eyes has been highly valued in feeling confident they’re delivering the best solution for their clients. Along with support with CloudCheckr and a portal to manage all their clients, Tulloch appreciates the sense of partnership delivered by Ingram Micro to make their use of AWS simple and effective.
For onboarding new clients, Stoic IT now typically saves 60-90 days in greenfield build projects.
Looking ahead, Tulloch is eager to investigate deeper support through architectural, technical and pre-sales assistance around larger, more complex jobs. He’s also excited by the potential of virtual desktops for truly flexible operations for highly mobile healthcare operations, and GPU acceleration in the cloud for medical research.
“It’s very little effort to explore a whole lot of benefits,” says Tulloch. “A bias to action is always a good thing.”
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