The Waikato District Health Board is working with Revera in modernising its core IT infrastructure in the cloud.
The three-year project will retire the DHB’s outsourced data centre in Hamilton, including aging enterprise servers and storage systems supporting 700-plus applications, and moving to on-demand infrastructure services from Revera’s Homeland Government IaaS Cloud.
Six months since the agreement was signed, systems migration is underway, with project teams completing detailed design and testing of a new virtualised environment hosted in Revera’s Takanini datacentre, and high capacity connections provided by Revera parent company Spark.
The DHB’s switch to cloud-based infrastructure follows a government directive requiring state health providers to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from vendors vetted and approved by the Department of Internal Affairs.
We’re in a much stronger position to pinpoint the financial implications of our usage and capacity, and avoid under and over investment in IT
Geoff King, CIO at the Waikato District Health Board, says on-demand infrastructure services allows the IT team to switch from managing commodity IT to higher-value services.
“Technology is a critical enabler of efficient high-quality healthcare,” says King, in a statement.
“This project is part of a much larger shift to cloud-based technology that will transform healthcare, paving the way for patient-centric IT and healthcare services closer to patient homes.
“It’s a big change for our IT team and also a big change for how we think and provision services,” says King.
“On-demand services change the way we manage our environment. We’re in a much stronger position to pinpoint the financial implications of our usage and capacity, and avoid under and over investment in IT.”
Waikato is the largest DHB in the Midland health region, with 6,000 staff. It operates five hospitals, with its main campus in Hamilton and four rural hospitals, and offers a wide range of community-based and health promotion services to around 450,000 people.
Over the next year, the DHB is expected to complete migration testing of non-production IT environments and low category software applications, eventually completing the switch to IaaS in 2019.
King says the migration involves large terabyte-sized data sets, applications containing millions of documents, and special measures to maintain 24x7 operations.
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