Insights
11 October 2024
Insights
Flexibility and business continuity: how Tinext Cloud has boosted SCuDo's IT
With increasing life expectancy, home care is now increasingly important to ensure dignity and independence for the elderly, as well as to provide comfort for people who are frail or in temporary need. This form of assistance takes the form of very different services, which must be provided quickly in emergencies, as well as with continuity and precision in all other cases. Services that, to be truly effective, require efficient management of operators and skills in the field. A context in which IT can make a difference in terms of supporting the coordination of resources, accessibility and information sharing, and avoiding time wastage. This is how Tinext Cloud has helped SCuDo, the Lugano home care and nursing service, to achieve excellence.
Home care: a responsibility involving IT
An association under private law recognised as a home care service in the public interest, SCuDo is in charge of a wide range of health services in the Ticino region: from support for out-of-hospital treatment to palliative care and personal hygiene assistance. These activities are carried out with a staff of about 250 operators, including OSS and nurses, who are coordinated in the field by means of portable terminals (tablets) and other systems at the Lugano headquarters and in the territorial detachments.
Essential for those who use them, SCuDo's services require effective management of personal data and their availability without interruptions or slowdowns. For this reason, already in past years, the Association has equipped itself with an IT infrastructure that is as reliable as possible, managed by the internal IT department, with system support from Tinext Cloud. An in-house department intended to deal with all problems: from the simplest ones, such as configuring a tablet, to the most critical ones concerning the operational components of the data centre. Tasks, made more complex by company vicissitudes, such as the reorganisations faced by the Association over time.
Virtualisation for IT flexibility and easier management
In order to meet its operational requirements, SCuDo's IT department has had to deal with the evolution of its IT infrastructure with great expertise over time. As apioneer in the use of virtualisation (with Broadcom VMware's vSAN) introduced on the initiative of CIO Jean Claude Guidi, SCuDo took advantage of Tinext Cloud's consultancy to migrate workloads from the on premise infrastructure of Intel modular servers, now dated and at the end of its life cycle, to modern HPE servers. The migration, which was carried out without affecting the operability of the IT services, gave the infrastructure a quantum leap and improved its scalability. The mail servers, domain controller and management software were gradually migrated to virtual platforms, making the administration of the data centre much less burdensome than before and improving the security of data and applications. In this way, SCuDo has been able to guarantee greater continuity of information services on a 24/7 basis, making it more efficient to store and make available in real time the thousands of client files with current therapies, diagnostic photographic documents, intervention schedules and everything else the operators need to carry out their work at home. Information that is vital to SCuDo's services and the health of the people being cared for, and which requires the IT department to take care in scheduling maintenance work well in advance so that operators can safeguard themselves by downloading data locally.
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Disaster recovery to ensure business continuity
SCuDo's IT infrastructure is the result of considerable investment and a long-standing commitment to guaranteeing maximum privacy of patient health data and rapid responses to requests from remotely accessing caregivers. Thanks to the architectural choices made, in particular with the adoption of virtualisation, these capabilities can now be easily extended beyond the limits of the in-house data centre. A crucial aspect is business continuity, which can be put at risk by unpredictable incidents, human error or possible cyber attacks. Risks that SCuDo has mitigated with the help of Tinext Cloud through a Data Resilience strategy, orchestrated through the use of the Veeam Data Platform.
With Veeam, both punctual on-site backups and offloads to immutable object storage are managed for data requiring long-term retention (20 years for some health data).
The project also provides for a replication of SCuDo's data centre in the Tinext data centre (VMware vCloud) thanks to systems that synchronise data in real time. In the event of an emergency affecting the operation of the main data centre, the virtual twin would come into operation, allowing SCuDo's operators to continue their work of caring for people.
The benefits of a tailor-made solution and partnership with Tinext Cloud
The implementation and contractual adaptability offered by Tinext Cloud allowed SCuDo to use the disaster recovery service with flexible ‘as-a-service’ contractual modalities, similar to those of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud services also offered by Tinext Cloud. The service is provided through infrastructural components hosted within the SCuDo data centre and managed remotely by Tinext Cloud. As in other projects carried out by Tinext Cloud for realities with peculiar needs, the solution was ‘tailor-made’ to meet specific data power requirements.
In addition to benefiting from a customised disaster recovery service, the creation of a twin environment gave SCuDo greater flexibility in evaluating new application solutions, for example for use in remote desktop and virtual desktop mode. Tinext Cloud's ability to provide hosting and cloud solutions with servers and data based in Switzerland, and therefore under Swiss legal jurisdiction, helps to provide the necessary guarantees for companies working with critical data, such as SCuDo.
The willingness to engage in joint project work allowed Tinext Cloud to identify the most suitable service solutions for SCuDo's specific on-premise environment, formulating reasonable contractual agreements for both parties in the area of support and service levels (SLAs). Commitment to consulting, attention to customer needs in the configuration of services and contracts are the qualities that an IT partner such as Tinext Cloud brings to bear on realities dissatisfied with the prefabricated cloud solutions of large international providers.
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