Background

Located in the heart of Ontario’s lake country, there is a community hospital providing regional programs, as well as surgical and medical services to local residents. For over a century, the Ontario hospital healthcare team has been acknowledged and respected for providing exceptional care and services to their patients.

Challenge

The community hospital, which has 175 beds, is facing increasing difficulties maintaining the existing decentralized application and service deployments to both remote and local staff. Current desktop management, refresh and deployment cycles are inefficient, cost-intensive and difficult to budget. As a result, the hospital was looking to adjust their IT infrastructure strategy and operations to assist with business requirements and objectives, specifically to implement a centralized means of application delivery, increasing IT agility and simplifying management.

Approach

Third Octet follows a proven six step methodology approach to determine the best solution for implementation and end user managed services, if required, for our clients.

Solution

The six step outcome, The Third Octet solution, provided the hospital with Citrix Portfolio, a Citrix Delivery Services infrastructure, based in central Ontario to satisfy centralized delivery of most, if not all, corporate applications. Citrix Portfolio provides the hospital with a highly-available, scalable and easily administered Citrix Delivery Infrastructure design based on virtualization, and current Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop v7.x and related portfolio technology to facilitate internal and external delivery of applications and information assets to the hospital staff using the FlexCast model On-Demand Applications. The design advocates simplicity and efficiency for both end users and IT administrators – simplicity for end users by accommodating the principle of working anywhere and from any device with efficiency such that it is available and reliable at any time; and simplicity and efficiency for IT administrators by eliminating repetitive issues, introducing orchestration and environment visibility, and delivering adequate knowledge to not only manage the environment but also to scale it properly to accommodate future growth and requirements.

Results

With simplicity and efficiency as the key objective within the new Citrix Delivery Infrastructure, the hospital is provided with an infrastructure that is entirely new, yet still aligns with comfort and knowledge levels that already exist, or exist but with gaps that were easily closed during implementation. By centralizing application access and delivery through virtualization in the data center, desktop lifespans are extended, new applications effortlessly deployed and data leak risk mitigated. The hospital now functions pro-actively, able to plan more effectively with more resources as a result of fewer man hours and the ability to depend on fixed cost planning now and into the future.