Calibre One and Telstra take Northern Territory healthcare provider to the cloud

Staff from Northern Territory Primary Health Networks (NTPHN) were struggling to keep on top of their work with an IT environment suffering from constant performance issues.

The regional healthcare provider's IT environment was migrated from one managed services provider to another over the years, and rather than starting with a new solution each time, it was just copied from one environment to the next.

NTPHN's IT workload was located in a shared environment running on Windows Server 2008 and 2012, hosted by the incumbent MSP, which led to system lockups on a daily basis.

The Citrix environment was prone to locking up or hanging for minutes and as a result, actions wouldn’t be performed unless absolutely necessary. Staff created and edited documents directly onto their PCs, instead of the Citrix environment, meaning there were no backups. Staff resorted to emailing documents back and forth, putting even greater stress on email services.

After going out to tender for a solution, Calibre One partnered with Telstra to build a new environment from the ground up.

They found that only a third of the servers needed to be built, as many legacy systems had not been decommissioned after upgrades from incumbent IT providers.

The new solution used Telstra's CSX Gen-2 cloud, a first for Calibre One, which uses dedicated Cisco blade technology for high availability computing and redundancy.

Microsoft workloads were migrated to the cloud, allowing NTPHN to remove three Exchange servers and four Lync servers.

Before rolling out Skype for Business, NTPHN's department head's had to conduct meetings via telephone conferences with no visual aid. Now staff have video conferencing capabilities to use whenever they need.

NTPHN's executive manager, operations Shari Tanzer said: “NTPHN’s staff are now able to focus on their own day-to-day business and plan for future ways in which new projects could further better NTPHN’s ability to conduct business in the Northern Territory, with improved speed, reliability and with the knowledge that we have a strong partnership with Calibre One to support us on our journey.

“We look forward to continuing to work with the Calibre One team as we navigate the challenges of technological change and continue to reshape the future for our organisation."

Calibre One and Telstra are finalists in the Working Together category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. Follow this link for the full list of finalists. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on 6-7 April.

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