Nursing Homes Ireland
Cloud migration and Windows Virtual Desktops give remote staff quick and secure access to all they need to work remotely.
Overview
Nursing Homes Ireland is the national representative body for the private and voluntary nursing home sector. There are over 460 such nursing homes in Ireland providing care to over 25,000 people. Circa 30,000 staff are employed by private and voluntary nursing homes to provide 24/7 specialist clinical, health and social care to people with high dependency care needs. Nursing Homes Ireland’s mission is to actively support and represent their members, enabling them to provide sustainable, high quality care to their residents.
Challenge
Nursing Homes Ireland has over 20 staff based in their Head Office in Citywest, Dublin. In 2020 NHI had an IT roadmap in place which included replacement of their physical server. However when Covid-19 struck in March it had a significant impact on nursing homes and huge knock on effects for Nursing Homes Ireland in supporting their members. HCS assisted NHI in enabling secure remote access for staff. With the pandemic in full swing HCS had to work quickly to help NHI at a very challenging time for their organisation.
Solution
It was clear the new systems would need to be based in the Cloud for ultimate flexibility. HCS proposed Azure Virtual Desktops for secure remote access to all of their applications and data which we migrated from their onprem server to Azure Virtual Servers. In addition, HCS recommended an upgrade from Microsoft 365 Business Standard to Microsoft 365 Business Premium to utilise all of the security features contained within the premium product suite. The entire solutions was built and delivered remotely.
NHI now had a future proofed Azure cloud solution. Operating systems would no longer need to be upgraded or potentially fall behind. Similarly hardware would no longer need to be upgraded or replaced. Their infrastructure was now fully cloud based and not subject to the local broadband in HQ. From a security perspective, what really appealed to NHI was that no data would reside on any device. Every login to their systems outside their office is effectively unique, utilising Multifactor Authentication.
NHI now have a scalable, flexible, and cloud-based IT environment which is secure and more responsive enabling them to meet today’s challenges and position them for future growth.
