Our transformation journey started
probably about five years ago,
and we had just gone live with an application at two sites,
and we hit a performance problem.
We couldn't buy the hardware, new hardware,
because we didn't have any capital for that.
So on the back of a company credit card,
we quickly spun up a couple of instances
with two people on AWS at the time.
What we managed to do on that environment,
was able to scale out that environment
at a fraction of the cost,
but be able to constantly test and scale
and run load testing on there
to try to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
We saw the value of how to use that platform
without having to put significant investment in.
So we had our platform established,
we had our teams trained,
and we needed to accelerate
how we moved more of our applications
into this new way of operating.
So we decided to partner with industries,
AWS Professional Services and Versent,
in this particular case.
AWS Professional Services
is a consulting arm of Amazon Web Services.
We work together with our customers
to make sure that their cloud journey
is as smooth as possible.
AWS Professional Services and Versent
worked collaboratively with the eHealth team
to successfully deliver the mass migration project.
We were tasked and challenged at the start
to really transform what we were recommending to eHealth.
It would really take a replatform
and a transformational approach,
but not only just the technology,
the people taking an agile approach,
and really the tools as well to take an automated approach
to the entire process,
rather than just taking what was existing
and placing that in AWS.
By partnering with our cloud providers,
we engaged with them through their professional services arm
to come and embed within our product teams
and work with our new cloud engineers to upskill them
on cloud technology, ways of working, DevOps,
and we found it very beneficial for our cloud engineers
to have the expertise of world leaders in this space
working alongside them every day.
For example, we've migrated eight
of our largest clinical applications to the AWS cloud space,
and we've been lucky enough to partner
with some of our application vendors
to be the first organisation, either nationally or globally,
to rehost these applications in the cloud space.
I can honestly say I couldn't tell the difference
between an eHealth member of staff
or a Proserv member of staff.
And they essentially helped us as one
to move our platforms together.
Some of the main skills we picked up
as part of this engagement was infrastructure as code,
DevOps, pipelines, code pipelines,
using Terraform to code services
and gaining familiarity with the whole set of services
offered by AWS.
The benefits of learning how to code infrastructure
has been that we can provision services much quicker
on behalf of our customers,
and we can do so in a much more efficient,
repeatable manner.
This has proven invaluable for us
because of the time savings, the stability,
and the time to actually get services up and running.
A good example of this is
with our imaging repository application.
So this has a really large storage footprint
of about 1.6 petabytes of data,
and it grows at around 25% per year at the moment.
By leveraging AWS FSx for ONTAP,
we're able to drastically reduce the amount of time
that it takes to provision new storage for this application
to keep up with the growth rate.
It used to take a number of weeks on-prem
to go through the process of configuring and installing
the hardware, let alone the procurement process
that's behind that,
whereas in the cloud, it now takes a matter of minutes.
In eHealth New South Wales,
we've had a customer who's been really ambitious
about that move to cloud.
It's about finding the efficiencies
within those applications of those architectures,
replatforming what they can to gain those efficiencies,
and making the most of what the cloud provides
in turn to provide that benefit back to their clinicians
and their consumers,
which are patients in New South Wales.
It's very rare to be able to have an opportunity
to work on a project of such scale.
In this work, we impacted 8 million citizens
and over 220 hospitals.
Versent has been really proud over the last two years
to work alongside eHealth and AWS Professional Services
to deliver such a monumentous transformation,
but really what we've seen is the growth within
eHealth's people to go from a standing start,
not knowing the techniques and tools within AWS cloud,
but now to become specialists themselves.
We definitely saw the benefits
of this partnership approach.
So, the eHealth staff,
we are SMEs in running the clinical applications,
we’re SMEs in the way that our organisation works.
By partnering with AWS and bringing
their technical expertise into our teams
to work alongside our teams and upskill our teams,
we were able to get the best of the technology aspect,
and this experience has shown that we are better together.