Insights
06 novembre 2024
Insights
Services for the visually impaired and blind are crucial for active integration into society and, like business activities, owe much to the digital technologies and IT used for support. To be useful, the latter must offer power, reliability and security in line with operational needs, which can only be achieved with well-managed and up-to-date systems. This is an issue that Unitas, the Association of the Blind and Visually Impaired of Italian-speaking Switzerland, has recently addressed by choosing to transfer critical workloads from on premises to the cloud, availing itself of Tinext Cloud's consultancy and infrastructural support. This project allowed the Association to limit the economic impact of periodic infrastructure upgrades and obtain guarantees of IT flexibility and reliability to support the future development of digital services to members. Let's take a look below at how the decision to adopt the cloud was made, how the migration was achieved and the benefits obtained.
With a staff of over eighty people working in different locations, Unitas is a medium-sized organisation, but not limited in its ability to provide services and support to an important community of people. The services offered range from counselling for visually impaired people of all ages, to the provision and training of aids and digital media, and include a braille and spoken book library, a home for the elderly and a day centre. The association, as a centre of expertise for the visually impaired, also defends interests, for example in relation to architectural barriers and other issues of interest in its field.
One of the services developed by Unitas over the years is NetBiblio, a digital archive containing thousands of voice-read texts for use by people with a visual impairment as well as page scans that can be enlarged at will for the visually impaired. The Association has made these solutions accessible online to its members and users thanks to its in-house on premises IT infrastructure. Both the management applications and the e-mail server rely on this infrastructure: key nodes for the organisation's efficiency and ability to respond promptly to members' requests.
Relying on in-house expertise and system support provided by Tinext Cloud, Unitas had developed its IT infrastructure in-house using modular servers on Intel technology. The result was a flexible architecture that was in need of an upgrade after years of honourable service. This was hampered by the obsolescence of the architecture, placing limits on scalability. This gave rise to the idea of reviewing the IT choices in the light of the new options available and, in perspective, to cope with evolving requirements in terms of performance, quality of services and security. Assessments that led to the decision to adopt cloud services. Using the cloud would not only have eliminated the immediate and future burdens of necessary hardware upgrades, but would also have reduced the costs of physical systems management by improving service levels (SLAs). The cloud would also have offered the scalability needed to support increases in the number of members, storage space, and support for new digital projects. In the case of the NetBiblio service, the cloud would have optimised the burden of transferring (large) files between production and the data centre, thus facilitating online use by members, freeing up network resources and ensuring better data protection and availability.
The migration project was carefully prepared, and carried out gradually to minimise negative impacts on the Association's services. In addition to hardware performance, assessments focused on core business applications and priorities for action. The objective of eliminating the most obsolete and risk-prone components made it a priority to move the e-mail server to the cloud, followed by the redesign and gradual migration of other services to the new environment.
The migration of data and applications between the existing on-premises infrastructure and the new cloud-based one required the provision of adequate network interconnections within a common security architecture, based on Fortinet components. Software encapsulation in VMware virtual machines and backups on the Veeam platform were then used to move data and workloads to Tinext Cloud's Vcloud service.
The migration operations were managed in gradual stages, over a period of about a year, accompanied by efforts to optimise the solutions in the new working environment. Unitas also upgraded the hardware, and migrated office applications to the Microsoft 365 platform, taking advantage of dedicated subscriptions for non-profit organisations. A SharePoint-based intranet was also created.
With the migration of applications from on premises systems to Tinext Cloud services, Unitas achieved a highly functional and secure IT environment, easily managed with the resources of the internal IT department. The operation has helped rationalise and optimise workloads thanks to Tinext's contribution in segmenting the environment into coherent functional blocks that, when backed up and restored, offer the certainty of recovering operational functions. With the pragmatic and technically agnostic support of Tinext Cloud, the obstacles arising from the presence in the information system of some obsolete management procedures awaiting replacement were overcome. By encapsulating this software in virtual machines and migrating it to the cloud, the risk of loss in the event of failure was averted, due to the extreme difficulty of restoring to the original hardware and operating environment.
With the cloud, Unitas' IT department retained the ability to operate autonomously, while still being able to rely on Tinext Cloud for the occasional need for help. The time saved in hardware management and adaptations of the physical data centre to evolving security and privacy regulations was usefully redeployed in evolving application environments and launching new digital initiatives.
On the data security and availability front, Unitas benefited from the elimination of NAS storage at local sites, replaced with modern remotely managed microservers, as well as firewall and VPN protection. With the help of Tinext Cloud, Unitas standardised the firewall protection of the different locations, centralising and strengthening administration through managed services. It also ensured higher levels of email and antivirus protection by taking advantage of the specific functionalities offered by the Microsoft 365 platform.