Client Snapshot How Capital Radiology Transformed Their IT Infrastructure with MOD3RN Cloud powered by 3verest Cloud Solutions

Client Snapshot: Who are they and what problem do they need solved?

Capital radiology are a diagnostic imaging specialist who pride themselves on being a community-focused, people-first organization committed to their patients and team.
They are in the top five radiology providers in Australia with a footprint that sits broadly across Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia. They have over 70 locations with a mixture of stand-alone sites as well as sites within hospitals, they have over 70 radiologists and over 2000 staff.
Uniquely, Capital Radiology is a publicly listed company which presents a greater level of oversight and compliance and regulatory requirements.

The legacy environment

• More than 100 servers, across 6 racks in 3 Data Centres with 1.5 petabytes of data.
• 5 different vendors delivering services including firewalls, server maintenance, database management.
• A mix of physical and virtual servers and hardware to maintain including Cisco servers and firewalls, HP servers, Dell servers, and Fortinet firewalls.
• 40 applications across all servers, with a mix of complex switching and networking.
• This legacy environment had inconsistencies in their licensing, warranty status, and patching.
• Several acquisitions over the years added a deeper layer of complexity and IT resources were focused on scrambling to understand the environment and the complexities within it, rather than focusing on supporting the business deliver the patient care they aspired to.
• This resulted in unnecessary and extended outages and interruptions to service delivery.

Problem we’re solving

1. IT personnel expertise and knowledge base
   • Capital Radiology were burdened with acquiring skilled IT talent, and given the highly complex nature of their environment, it meant that there was an over-emphasis on staffing and knowledge retention, rather than managing and maintaining the environment efficiently. Decision making in IT was chaotic, and compounded the complexity, rather than streamlining the experience.
   • They were seeking a solution that would give them the ability to get a handle on their systems, to work more efficiently and reduce the burden of acquiring and retaining skilled IT professionals.
2. Performance and business continuity
   • In the months leading up to transitioning to 3verest, there were multiple outages related to age of the equipment and lack of knowledge about how those 100 servers were setup and configured. There were many vendors to work with to resolve issues across this legacy environment, which further contributed to extended down-time.
   • Capital Radiology were seeking a solution that would improve the user experience, and the perception of IT and keep their radiologists working productively and without interruption.
3. Security standards not being managed efficiency
   • As a publicly listed company, they had a significant requirement around data sovereignty and where data was stored and how that data was accessed and how it was secured.  With a complex and clunky environment, IT was often burdened with the operational aspects and the team were not as focused on pro-actively maintaining security standards.
   • They were seeking a solution that would provide a consistent baseline of security standards, such as patching, anti-virus, and back-ups that would give them the flexibility to also work with Cyber Security vendors to improve their Cyber Security Posture.
4. Cost of ownership
   • An important part of the business case for moving to the cloud, included what the above and below the line costs were.    Hardline costs such as hardware, IT personnel and licensing.  However, it is much harder to understand the total cost of owning their environment.  Below the line costs including internet, electricity, and surge billing.
   • Capital Radiology were seeking a solution that would give them simplicity in billing, and reduce their overall IT Spend by half.
   • Task: Your responsibilities and assignments for the situation.
   • Action: Steps or procedure taken to relieve or rectify situation.

Approach & Solution: What did we do and why did we do it that way?

5. Develop Business case
   • Before Capital Radiology could procure providers to the solutions they were seeking, they first had to develop a business case for board approval. 3verest extensive expertise and specialization in private cloud was vital in supporting Capital Radiology to develop a compelling business case that was ultimately approved.
6. 3verest Detailed Discovery
   • Once the business case had been accepted, an 3verest Detailed Discovery of their environment was conducted.  Through this comprehensive audit process, 3verest we able to help Capital Radiology gain a deeper understanding of their IT Infrastructure and costs, both above and below the line.
7. 3verest Innovation Roadmap
   • 3verest highly skilled Cloud Solutions Architects mapped out the timeline, what the future state would look like and the steps involved.  The solution was highly configured to remove risk.  The 100 plus servers were migrated in small batches overnight.  All servers had an individual process which differed from server to server depending on their severity or complexity.  End user acceptance testing was conducted for each server, and only once the environment was successful were the servers decommissioned.  Whilst this meant a lengthy migration timeline, it was preferred to having any downtime.
8. 3verest concierge Project Management team
   • 3verest concierge Project Management team worked with Capital Radiology IT team to manage the transition for each server, mitigate risk and conduct end user testing.  There were a few challenges that presented themselves that the Project Management team needed to overcome:
   1. It was decided in the timeframe of migration, that the business would change network providers.  However, the network provider only had one node, and so all their data from around Australia was coming through Sydney node.  3verest built and designed the network to suit the business needs and worked with the provider to deliver nodes in other Australian capital cities.
   2. Capital Radiology are growing rapidly and were acquiring new sites during the timeframe of the migration project. 3verest expert engineers were agile in that process to account for their continued growth.
   3. There were inconsistencies in internet speed at various sites, and with the volume of data, some servers would not be migrated overnight.  The project management team worked to mitigate this challenge by removing the server from onsite to the DataCentre where the upload speeds are faster.

   Ultimately, the team delivered the project on-time and to budget.

9. Ongoing monthly reporting and account management
   • With such a complex environment, and with technological advances making rapid progress, this was not a set-and-forget transaction.  3verest continue to work with Capital Radiology to deliver technical expertise for their growing clinics, and to continue to improve patient care.

Result: Results of actions taken. Results: What was the outcome?  What did we learn?

10. IT personnel expertise and knowledge base: Work more efficiently and reduce the burden of acquiring and retaining skilled IT professionals.
    • Capital radiology are now able to focus on improving their patient care and optimising their line of business applications. They are no longer burdened with attracting, training and retaining technical staff that monitor and maintain their base-line environment. They can focus on developing the technical expertise that adds value directly to improving patient care.
11. Performance and business continuity: improve the user experience, and the perception of IT and keep their radiologists working productively and without interruption.
    • From one disruptive outage per month, to none. The perception of IT Personnel amongst the staff has improved dramatically, and radiologists are able to focus on delivering patient care. All their data is stored locally in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.
12. Security standards not being managed efficiency: a consistent baseline of security standards, such as patching, anti-virus, and back-ups that would give them the flexibility to also work with Cyber Security vendors to improve their Cyber Security Posture.
    • By moving to 3verest, Capital Radiology became ISO27001 qualified. With a consistent base-line of security standards, 3verest platform allowed for the flexibility of working with their chosen Cyber Security Vendors to improve their Cyber Security Posture.
13. Cost of ownership
    • Capital Radiology were seeking a solution that would give them simplicity in billing, and reduce their overall IT Spend. Prior to joining 3verest, their IT Spend as $2.2million annually. 3verest brought that spend to sub $1million annually.

Brand new day

Capital Radiology now has the peace of mind to know that their environment is taken care of by sophisticated cloud specialists with 20plus years experience in managing cloud for the Radiology sector.  They are focused on delivering the best possible patient care whilst ensuring their radiologists are the most efficient they possibly can be.  They are now a resilient and highly scalable enterprise.

Moral of the story?

Specialist cloud providers can maintain an environment far more efficiently and effectively than attempting to manage it inhouse.  With 3verest, you are getting the width and breadth of our experience, both globally and across multiple environments.  We know how to build systems to manage it and run it.  That depth of experience, you just, you, it’s very hard to build that internally and keep it internally.

“We have provided a virtualized platform that we manage and run, which is far more sophisticated and monitored by people far more capable than Capital Radiology want to or have internally.  There in lies the simplicity of it.  We’re doing this on scale and on mass.  This is our day job. They’re a radiology group.”

Scott Crawford

3verest CEO