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.
- Case Study
- SCuDo
Flexibility and business continuity: how Tinext Cloud has boosted SCuDo's IT
The collaboration with Tinext Cloud allowed us to implement a tailored solution, with a disaster recovery service that is flexible and adaptable to our needs. The personalized approach and the assurance of an infrastructure managed by a specialized partner enable SCuDo to focus on its core mission of serving the community.
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.
From data center to service: managed on premise virtualisation for more agile IT
To meet operational needs, SCuDO’s IT department has had to skillfully manage the evolution of its IT infrastructure over time. A pioneer in the use of virtualization (with Broadcom VMware vSAN), introduced under the initiative of CIO Jean Claude Guidi, SCuDO relied on Tinext Cloud’s expertise to migrate its workloads from an aging on-premises infrastructure based on modular Intel servers to modern HPE servers. These new HPE servers were provided in a "pay-as-you-go" model as part of a fully managed IaaS solution delivered by Tinext Cloud and installed on-premises. In other words, SCuDO adopted a local virtualization infrastructure as a service, where the entire environment—from hardware to virtualization management—is handled by Tinext Cloud.
This approach freed the organization from the complexity and burden of hardware management, allowing the IT team to focus entirely on core business and application development. The migration, carried out without impacting IT service operations, marked a qualitative leap in infrastructure, improving scalability. Email servers, the domain controller, and the management software were gradually transferred to virtual platforms, making data center administration significantly less demanding and enhancing the security of data and applications.
As a result, SCuDO was able to ensure greater continuity of IT services in a 24/7 model, making real-time access and preservation of thousands of client records—including ongoing treatments, diagnostic photo documentation, intervention plans, and all the resources required for home care—more efficient. These are vital records for SCuDO’s services and for the health of the people they support, which require careful planning of maintenance operations by the IT team, enabling field operators to proactively download data locally as needed.
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 Cloud data center (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.