Case Study

The Challenge

Established in 2008, Cura has grown to become Australia’s largest day hospital company, providing high quality, patient-centric care in specialist areas spanning Ear, Nose & Throat, Gastroenterology, Gynaecology & IVF, Oral-Maxillofacial, Obstetrics, Orthopaedic, Plastic & Reconstructive, Urology, and Ophthalmology.

With 29 separate facilities operating across ACT, NSW, QLD, SA, TAS, VIC, and WA, Cura are committed to providing the highest standards of patient care and sit at the forefront of the latest medical technology.

On any given day, hundreds of patients are treated by myriads of leading health specialists and carers. For many, the procedures can be the difference between pain and relief, or even life and death.

Critical to Cura’s exceptional delivery of care is their underpinning infrastructure. Recognising the need for a digital transformation – partly driven by leadership concerns about the health of some critical infrastructure – Cura had earmarked several initiatives to transform business operations and future-proof the organisation.

Those concerns were compounded by the technical support Cura were receiving. Since inception, Cura had worked with a small MSP – a partner now struggling to keep pace with Cura’s growing infrastructure and workloads.

Cognisant of the need for a partner capable of supporting their long-term digital aspirations, Cura’s IT heads and management team realised they needed help at an operational level immediately. Reliant on a hosted environment running VMWare, initial warranties on the underlying hardware were long gone. And with the extended warranties set to expire, any kind of outage or hardware failure was now threatening to take Cura offline for hours, if not days.

Although access to email and the ability to connect with SaaS services would survive, Cura couldn’t countenance any disruptions to the critical line-of-business applications their staff and patients depend upon.

The Solution

Having selected Brennan as their preferred MSP, Cura’s IT Team worked with our cloud leads to triage their environment. Electing for a wholesale transition to Azure, we validated the decision by securing Field Led funding from Microsoft to run a Cloud Adoption Framework workshop, plus Proof-of-Concept development.

Based on the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, Brennan’s Azure Foundations is a tried-and-true solution for Enterprise-sized organisations who own, operate, and manage significant digital estates. Developed and continually refined over time as the Cloud grows and matures, our coded approach has facilitated comprehensive and complex transitions to Azure for dozens of customers.

Given the greenlight to proceed, we leveraged Azure Migrate to assess Cura’s workload and right-size their Virtual Machines to ensure that when they did land in Azure, they were appropriately sized and economical to run.

With the clock ticking, speed, rigour, and precision were key. Using our proven Azure Foundations solution – a coded approach honed from experience with other complex cloud migrations projects – we worked with Cura to deploy a foundational environment, as well as embedding governance and control parameters to ensure their cloud environment was set up for long-term success.

Azure Migrate assisted in lifting and shifting the majority of workloads, while others were more appropriately rebuilt inside Azure. Migrations can bring skeletons out of the closet, but we were quick to identify and remediate instances where transitioned services weren’t initially recognised.

Throughout it all, we helped Cura at an application level, helping them understand what impacts the migration would have. All told, migrating Cura’s virtual machines – 107 in total – took eight weeks.