Allied Health Australia

“We were comfortable with the people who were there
to support us with what we needed to do.”

Kevin Garvey, Director at Allied Health Australia

Organisation
Allied Health Australia is a health and wellness organisation that specialises in workplace injury rehabilitation and well-being restoration. These services are delivered through two of its companies — Pinnacle Rehab and Peak Conditioning — both operating in Crows Nest, New South Wales. The company has been operating for more than 20 years, working with Allied Health professionals in delivering specialist healthcare services.

Allied Health wanted to establish a modern digital workplace and enable more productive and engaging workstyles for their employees. Their existing infrastructure was preventing the achievement of this goal.

Allied Health had a strong desire to use Power BI for data manipulation, analysis, and visualisation to create tailored reports from business data, Kevin Garvey, Director of Allied Health, began discussions with Professional Advantage (PA) on what a future IT infrastructure might include.

Download your copy of the summarised version HERE.

Need
A dedicated Microsoft cloud tenant leveraging Microsoft Azure, Express Route, Microsoft Security, and Office 365 was presented as a possible option, and Power BI was established in a dedicated tenant for Allied Health as a first step towards this plan.

The need to progress a decision on Allied Health’s IT infrastructure plans became pressing when their IT hosting services provider created a very tight 5-week window to move out of its hosted data centre facility.

With a significant set of business-critical applications and employee mailboxes to migrate, they needed an IT Cloud Services partner that could help them make a safe, reliable, rapid, and secure transition to another cloud services hosted platform.

Solution
Professional Advantage to the rescue
Being both familiar and in agreement with the Microsoft Cloud Strategy presented by Professional Advantage, and having already adopted and actively using Office 365 for Power BI, Allied confidently chose PA as its cloud migration and managed service partner.

Garvey was also relying on his positive 10-year business relationship with PA as a solution provider, their Microsoft Gold Partner status, and its breadth of expertise across a wide range of Microsoft’s products and services that were relevant to Allied Health.

With a very constrained project implementation timeframe and a substantial amount of technical work needed for the migration, it was “all hands-on deck” for PA. Their Cloud & Infrastructure consulting team immediately coordinated and implemented Azure Express Route for connectivity to the Microsoft cloud platform and migrated 135 Allied mailboxes to the dedicated Office 365 tenant they had previously established for Power BI.

Allied Health’s business-critical applications such as their accounting system, payroll, and procurement systems, as well as their case management application, were all transitioned from the existing hosted VMware platform to Microsoft Azure running as Virtual Machines monitored and managed by Professional Advantage.

PA’s rapid and agile response, flexibility, technical expertise, and obvious experience, in addition to its excellent and effective project management capabilities, led to the successful and seamless Azure migration for Allied Health within the shortened and urgent 5-week timeframe provided. 


“The Professional Advantage team is solutions-orientated. They try to find ways to help us to get the implementation to occur despite a lot of timeframe challenges. They were truly effective, knowledgeable, and have helped us with staying on top of the implementation. They have a good understanding of the sensitivity of moving environments and data and have made the transition relatively seamless for our end-users.”
Kevin Garvey, Director at Allied Health Australia


Results
Improved IT operations.
Moving to the Microsoft Cloud Platform for both Productivity (Office 365) and IT Infrastructure as a Service (Azure) has enabled Allied Health to improve and gain more control over its IT operations and security, and further enhance its user’s experience. Establishing a dedicated tenant on Office 365 has mitigated the business risk of potential data exposure or compromise.

Unlike their previous arrangement where user identity creation and de-activation was necessarily transacted through their hosting services provider, Azure allowed self-service capability for Allied Health to do it quickly and efficiently on their own with their staff. End users now use Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication across their desktops, laptops, and phones with their Office 365 and Google accounts, thereby reducing log-ins from 4 to just 1.

The implementation of Azure Remote Desktop Services (RDS) has enabled the company to allow its part-time and contract staff, spread all over Australia, to remotely access desktops and applications in their Chromebooks. This virtualisation service offers Allied Health the convenience and time-saving benefit to ship and provision Chromebooks quickly and easily, especially if they breakdown or are damaged and are inoperable for staff.


"There’s going to be a cost-benefit to our environment on the RDS versus our previous one and we can use that extra budget to enhance the experience." 
Kevin Garvey, Director at Allied Health Australia

More value for money.
Allied Health’s move to the Microsoft Cloud Platform resulted in more “bang for their buck”. The transition from its previous Citrix Remote Application Access Infrastructure to Azure RDS has allowed the company to leverage and maximise its Azure cloud investment and to cut on unnecessary IT licensing and operating costs moving forward. With an Azure Express Route connection implemented on their corporate network to the Internet, bandwidth has increased by three times its previous effective speed and throughput. It has resulted in an increase from 250 Mbps bandwidth to a 1 Gbps connection for the same price they were previously paying.

The move to a dedicated Office 365 tenant also opened doors towards pursuing a more modern digital-centric workplace and workstyle for employees by utilising the existing applications available in Office 365. Future initiatives on Power BI, SharePoint, and Teams utilisation are now being explored.


“People make a big difference in technology. They combine their problem-solving skills with their ability to look at other products that can really help the business and not just offer basic desktops. The value add for businesses really comes in making sure they work seamlessly with the productivity tools that can be leveraged off that environment.”
Kevin Garvey, Director at Allied Health Australia