Sooner or later, every organization has to deal with the growth of its IT infrastructure. Organic and desirable, over time it risks becoming a brake on productivity. In the healthcare sector, the combination of digitization, consolidation of facilities, and the need for renewal means that more and more internally grown data centers are becoming unsustainable and ideal candidates for migration to the cloud.
“Ferb Onlus, our long-standing customer, needed to renew its equipment,” explains Fabio Zanchi, Cloud Architect & FinOps Specialist at SORINT.lab. With the hardware and software management contracts coming to an end, the data center also needed to be refreshed.”
Repeated several times over the years, the operation had become increasingly unsustainable and less strategic in the context of managing a healthcare facility. It was a situation where the cloud soon proved to be a natural evolution. “Together, we identified three fundamental reasons for following this path,” continues Zanchi. “In addition to costs, all the advantages in terms of security and reliability of the IT infrastructure, understood above all as scalability, soon emerged.”
The European Biomedical Research Foundation is a very dynamic organization, where the acquisition of new facilities and their integration is always a possibility to be considered, as is their eventual disposal.
Furthermore, this is a sector where budgeting is always a particularly sensitive issue, with the need to ensure, first and foremost, that healthcare costs are covered. The decision to move towards FinOps therefore proved to be particularly wise, providing further confirmation of the validity of the path taken.
Migration to Oracle Cloud: choosing the provider
Faced with estimated savings of 35% for IT management, as calculated by SORINT.lab, the only question was how to proceed with the migration to the cloud, starting with the delicate choice of provider. “It took just a couple of meetings to reach an agreement and recognize Oracle as the most suitable service,” emphasizes Zanchi. “We moved from a centralized internal structure to a configuration where each structure connects directly via VPN, so that if there are problems at one site, the others are not affected.”
This was a carefully considered choice, made in the best interests of Ferb. In similar situations, SORINT.lab also plays an important advisory role. The choice of provider is not made on the basis of partnership agreements, but by evaluating all the alternatives on the market and identifying the one most in line with objectives, ambitions, guarantees, and costs.
The opportunity also proved useful for optimizing services, again with a FinOps approach, consolidating them as much as possible to make the most of remote access. This approach was soon extended to the updating of operating systems and related applications.