New England Life Care Enhances Patient Care with Cloud Migration
Discover how New England Life Care improved performance and security with a private cloud migration.
Introduction
New England Life Care is a non-profit organization that provides in-home infusion and nursing care. Since 1987, the organization has created win-win environments for patients and hospitals, freeing up beds and returning patients to a more comfortable setting where they are less susceptible to infections.
When it was time to relocate some branches, New England Life Care knew they didn’t want to maintain or move their on-premises data center, so it was time to modernize and evaluate cloud options.
Challenges
New England Life Care faced challenges with their aging primary data center located in South Portland, Maine. The organization recognized the need to transition away from managing an on-premises data center due to several factors. Firstly, the capital expenditure required to maintain and replace outdated equipment was no longer financially viable. Additionally, the client wanted to reduce the burden of overseeing the data center's operations, as they lacked the necessary staffing resources to effectively manage an on-premises facility.
After consulting with a cloud partner, New England Life Care decided to meet and move forward with TierPoint to fulfill their facility and staff augmentation needs. The client had a limited timeframe and budget to move two branches, as well as regulatory concerns for sensitive patient data, so the migration had to be done quickly and securely.
Solutions
Prior to the move, the New England Life Care IT team was constantly dealing with urgent tasks. Their aging infrastructure led to different service outages, including A/C and power issues. “My team was probably doing too much firefighting,” said Jeremy Dugas, Director of Information Technology. “It was getting exhausting. We knew we needed a new solution.”
TierPoint was able to help New England Life Care migrate and modernize along the way, while offering data center management services to take firefighting off the client’s plate. With a private cloud solution, New England Life Care was able to gain the control and security they needed, keep some of their legacy workloads, and switch out old equipment for new solutions. The modernization ushered in by cloud migration allowed them to immediately see better availability and performance.
With modernization, a major goal for New England Life Care was to have stability. TierPoint designed a stable setup and improved performance with Pure Storage, which provided a cloud-like feel and great scalability to the environment. If New England Life Care was to expand their offerings to a new branch, Pure Storage can remain as the storage solution with upgraded hardware.
Compliance is a concern for any health care business. With TierPoint, New England Life Care was able to migrate into a SOC 2 and HIPAA-compliant environment that offered high availability, protecting patient data before, during, and after the move.
The migration process with TierPoint involves an assessment, replication, and internal testing to ensure everything came over properly. New England Life care was prepared and organized for the migration, which allowed TierPoint to move 50 servers in four waves based on common dependencies. This resulted in an uneventful migration, an ideal scenario for everyone.
In addition to the private cloud environment, New England Life Care also uses TierPoint for Microsoft 365. While they worked with a previous company for licensing, they decided to switch to TierPoint for the additional support and staff augmentation they needed. TierPoint got the team started, augmenting where needed, and helped with managing the environment post-migration. The organization regularly uses Office, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
The stability offered by private cloud, paired with resources in Microsoft 365, enables field nurses and onsite nurse liaisons to coordinate orders from doctors to get the right care to patients in their homes. Field nurses work with patients 24/7, so constant, reliable performance is critical.
Results
When asked to mark the difference between the on-premises environment and the new private cloud infrastructure, Dugas said that the change has been “a thousand times better than it was. Security, high availability, uptime - not a hiccup in the world.”
“The Pure Array's performance upgrade quietly transformed our productivity, reducing IT tickets and empowering our team to prioritize patient care over technical roadblocks. It's a game-changer that not only boosts efficiency but also allows us to redirect focus towards meaningful projects, ultimately serving our mission to improve patient outcomes.” - Jeremy Dugas, Director of Information Technology
While modernizing with private cloud has removed many of New England Life Care’s immediate concerns around security and reliability, their next project with TierPoint will continue to improve their business continuity and disaster recovery measures. Before moving to the Andover data center, redundancy and reliability was a concern, but that worry dissipated after Dugas took a tour of the new home for their servers: “The building looks fantastic. It’s got redundancy all over the place, so that doesn’t worry me anymore.” However, natural disasters, human error, ransomware, and other cyber threats are still top of mind to address with a more robust business continuity plan.
At A Glance
Industry
Health Care
Technology
Microsoft 365, Private Cloud, Security, BaaS or Back Ups, Pure Storage.
Challenges
Facing an aging on-premises data center, New England Life Care wanted to move to a private cloud solution to modernize, augment their staff, and improve stability and performance of their workloads.
Solution
The organization worked with TierPoint to move 50 servers to the Andover data center, taking advantage of managed service offerings, SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, and flexible Pure data storage. They also moved their Microsoft 365 licenses over to receive added support with implementation and management.
Results
Private cloud was a vast improvement to the organization’s on-premises system, offering better uptime, performance, and scalability. New England Life Care’s next step is to work with TierPoint to enhance their business continuity through disaster recovery plans and other measures.
Website
https://www.nelifecare.org/
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