Familiehulp, the largest homecare provider in Flanders and Brussels with more than 12,000 employees, has merged all its data centres and servers in a single, central, externally hosted environment. All applications, from email to custom ERP software, were migrated to the new infrastructure in December 2013. At the same time Familiehulp also switched to a pay-per-use model, whereby IT costs vary according to actual use. This results in extra flexibility: the ICT infrastructure can be adapted to changes in the organisation at any time.
The new, centralised infrastructure is housed in the RealDolmen Cloud Data Centre at InterXion, with a back-up facility 25km away that can be switched to in the event of any disaster. This means RealDolmen can guarantee its clients an IT infrastructure that is available at all times. The Familiehulp project fits within the HP CloudAgile programme, for which RealDolmen was the first partner in Belgium.
RealDolmen is responsible for the complete management of servers, storage systems, application platform and security – including hardware and software. Familiehulp pays a monthly fee for this service, which is fully based on a pay-per-use concept. This amount is therefore determined by actual monthly usage, meaning the IT cost is much easier to forecast, and there is no large basic investment in hardware and software required.
“Flexibility is essential,” says Griselda Symons, ICT Director for Familiehulp vzw. “About 850 of our employees have access to the system at the moment, but this number can fluctuate greatly depending on a number of social and professional developments. As well as an increasing demand for care for the elderly, we are also seeing people being discharged from hospitals faster following an operation or treatment, and needing more care at home. We have to be able to adapt our ICT infrastructure permanently and proactively to cope with such fundamental changes within the organisation or society.”
Another important factor is the increasing demand from the government for the sharing of information via digital platforms (such as e-Health, Vitalink, Vesta, the Electronic Patient Record, and so on). “This demands more from our ICT,” explains Symons, “which has to ensure our system is easily accessible at all times while also being sufficiently secure to never compromise patient data confidentiality.”
“This project illustrates the RealDolmen philosophy very well: we make your business work,” says Dirk De Waegeneire, Managing Director of the Professional Services Infrastructure division for RealDolmen. “We ensure the client’s IT environment works optimally and continues to run under all circumstances, so they don’t have to be concerned with it and can concentrate on their core tasks.”
The switch to a cloud concept became a reality following a successful consolidation and migration project. Now this phase is complete, Familiehulp is using the new infrastructure as a basis for new automation projects.
