Peninsula Health Scale Up Remote Operations, from On-Prem to Azure in 2 Weeks

Peninsula Health cover a number of health facilities and hospitals in the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula areas of Victoria, Australia. Its charge includes Frankston Hospital, The Mornington Centre, Rosebud Hospital, Hastings Community Health and Golf Links Road Rehabilitation Centre. Peninsula Health covers an area of approximately 850 square kilometres and a population of 300,000 people which can increase by around 100,000 in peak tourism seasons.

Thomas Duryea Logicalis (TDL) and Peninsula Health had been discussing the move to public cloud for a number of months when the COVID19 pandemic began to emerge. As the organisation started to prepare for the worst case scenario demonstrated by countries likes Spain and Italy, it was obvious to the group they would need to make some drastic and quick decisions to keep their facilities running.

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Challenge
The requirements for Peninsula Health were simple. Help us get 1,000 back office staff working remotely, in a secure fashion and in a way that least impacts their normal Business As Usual (BAU) way of working. There were a number of other challenges delivering this project to Peninsula Health:

  1. Peninsula Health was a traditional on premise organisation in every sense of the word, as an organisation conducting all of its services onsite, all of the back office staff tended to work from the facility as well, so remote working wasn’t something that had been tried and tested at scale. In addition to this, all of its infrastructure was also on-premise which made it impossible to support so many staff remotely logging in via VPN
  2. The second challenge was around the security of patient data with back office staff working remotely. It was simply not an option to have any breaches of security with patient data that could have been caused by just letting staff log on remotely without proper process and protocol being adhered to
  3. The final challenge was time, given the only way to support 1,000 workers concurrently was using the capacity and flexibility to scale with public Cloud. TDL had 2 weeks to set up and deploy a production ready Cloud platform to support the 1,000 staff, which happened just before the government lockdown was upon them

Solution
The solution proposed needed to be as close to the Citrix desktop environment that the Peninsula Health employees were used to, as there was no time for additional training or familiarity to get them up to speed.

When TDL got the call, mid-March, they stood up a proof of concept (POC) within a week, demonstrating our recommended solution of Citrix Cloud on Microsoft Azure using TDL’s production ready cloud platform capabilities. The full deployment took place a week later for 1,000 staff members.

TDL was able to do this at speed and scale by leaning on the Cloud maturity model that has served many organisations including the Department of Health and Human Services, in Victoria, Australia. On top of this, TDL also implemented Azure multi-factor authentication to ensure patient data was appropriately secured.

Result
Peninsula Health staff are working remotely with safe secure access to everything they need, something that couldn’t have happened without a careful considered plan on how the security of patient data and the hospital operations could be guaranteed with minimal disruption. The organisation had to jump in at the deep end and place its trust in TDL to take it from zero Cloud technologies, to production ready for its entire back office operation in 2 weeks.