The Southern District Health Board (SDHB) cares for 350,000 New Zealanders in the South Island from its hospitals, pharmacies, aged care, and trauma centre locations. Offering world-class facilities for its 5,500 staff led to the recent modernisation of its IT environment. SDHB wanted to streamline its operations on a single application and desktop delivery platform, servicing a range of health applications – within a cloud-first strategy. Since 2018 it has been working with INDE, which meant heading to the cloud was a ‘no brainer’ for the SDHB team. INDE, an award-winning and exclusive Citrix Platinum Plus Partner for NZ is also Asia Pacific & Japan’s only accredited Citrix Customer Success & Adoption Preferred Partner. INDE is the ideal fit for SDHB’s accelerated cloud adoption program.
The challenge
A re-design of delivering its clinical services to patients (to reduce waiting times) meant the time had come to begin the journey to the cloud. SDHB needed a highly secure hybrid-cloud environment with rapid roadmap capabilities to support virtual desktops and applications in the cloud. SDHB wanted to spin up workloads to help users log on quickly, without the SDHB IT administration team needing to dedicate more time to platform support activities such as, upgrading software, and patching security vulnerabilities. It also needed to prepare for its production workloads moving to the impending launch of Microsoft Azure in Auckland, New Zealand.
The solution
INDE was an early adopter of Citrix Cloud services globally and today views its relationship with Citrix as a ‘highly valued and critical component to its business’. INDE embedded its team of Citrix Workspace engineers within SDHB's IT team – effectively extending the capabilities of both organisations. This strong partnership meant moving to a new consumption-based Citrix Cloud services environment was completed in three months. SDHB’s Technology & Services Manager, Andy Crossman, led the initiative to build and test the new Citrix Cloud services environment in conjunction with the older legacy on-premises environment – cutting over to the new operating environment in record time.
Being an existing Citrix Workspace partner for SDHB and fuelled by its deep commitment to customer cloud adoption success, INDE knew the alignment between SDHB, and Citrix Cloud services was a highly strategic technology and business fit. INDE together with the SDHB IT team had been concentrating on building a more fit-for-purpose solution around Citrix architecture – everything from enhancing the hardware stack, single sign-on for staff capabilities, new endpoint management and finally, a roadmap for cloud services. This meant SDHB’s existing environment had been well-maintained and in an ideal cloud transformation ready state.
“INDE implemented an ‘evergreen’ Citrix Cloud services model, capable of mitigating platform upgrades and giving SDHB a future-proof platform for service aggregation,” says Ralf Donkers, Workspace Director for INDE.
Citrix and the path to public cloud
The move to Citrix Cloud services is now complete for SDHB, and this means it is well-positioned to take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Auckland datacenter. The next phase will be the introduction of Windows 10 multi-user virtual desktops – through the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop offering within Citrix Cloud – and this is now being explored as it’s a natural extension within the current platform. INDE has ensured Crossman’s team can now create and deploy secure digital workspaces across locations in hours – creating opportunities to introduce virtual desktops from both public cloud as well as in-country locations.
“Being Citrix Cloud architecture ready means SDHB can extend to the Azure NZ datacenter from launch, with no need for platform upgrades,” says Donkers.
THE INDE APPROACH As an award-winning Citrix Platinum Plus Partner, INDE has created a feature-rich, hybrid-cloud environment for one of NZ’s leading health care providers. With Citrix Cloud services, INDE has remained focused on delivering customer outcomes for SDHB, helping maximise and realise the investment in cloud services as quickly as possible.
Citrix Cloud services deliver:
- Zero impact in moving to the cloud with a simplified delivery, management, and security of Citrix technologies.
- An automatic reduction in administration time and IT costs as Citrix manages all core infrastructure components as part of their evergreen cloud service.
- Continued streamlining of costs and additional feature functionality encouraging greater productivity, even remotely.
- Ability to include any location as part of the application delivery architecture, being it any cloud, or any datacenter. Allowing your users to connect to services in close proximity to the application backends.
INDE and Citrix
INDE’s reputation as a first-to-market innovator for Citrix Cloud technologies is reflected in the commitment we have made to achieving the first Citrix Platinum Plus Partner accreditation for NZ and the current sole accreditation as a Citrix Customer Success & Adoption Preferred Partner for Asia Pacific & Japan. We have dedicated our organisation to understanding Citrix solutions, and this means we can focus on customer outcomes in a time-to-value model.
