Health-care provider saved money by migrating two data centres into Dimension Data hybrid cloud

Victorian-based health care provider Mercy Health has saved an estimated $1.2 million following the migration of production workloads into a hybrid cloud environment.

Mercy Health CIO Dmitri Mirvis said the cost savings resulted from not having to upgrade aging servers and IT infrastructure. The health provider was running two physical data centres in Melbourne and Sydney.

I joined Mercy Health at the end of 2012 and I performed a review of the situation in our IT space. It was obvious that a lot of infrastructure was crumbling and was getting in the way of us implementing new systems, he said.

The majority of Mercy Healths servers were seven years' old. It was also running older versions of system software like Windows Server 2003.

Instead of looking at service improvements, most of my infrastructure team was spending their time juggling pieces of hardware, said Mirvis.

It was clear that we had to build our technical foundation as the first step of IT strategy. The way forward would be to go to the cloud. I was fairly comfortable with the cloud concept because in my previous job, I was exposed to utility computing as it was called in the early 2000s which had similar principals to the cloud.

After going to tender, the health provider selected Dimension Data. In June 2014, the vendor completed a nine-month migration of Mercy Healths entire data centre environment to the cloud, providing the organisation with improved agility, reliability and operating efficiencies.

Mercy Health now uses Dimension Datas Melbourne managed cloud platform (MCP) for production workloads and the vendors Sydney MCP as its disaster recovery site.

According to Mirvis, it chose Dimension Data as they were a good match for a mid-size organisation like Mercy Health. The health care provider has 5500 staff and runs 31 sites across Australia.

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Mercy Health saves $1.2 million by moving to the cloud