Customer Overview
The Royal Flying Doctor Service (Queensland) is a part of one of the largest and most comprehensive aero-medical organisations in the world. It provides emergency and primary health care services for those living in rural, remote and regional Queensland. A not-for-profit organisation, the Flying Doctor relies on the support of the community and in Queensland the Service needs to raise over $12 million per year to keep the Flying Doctor flying.
Business Situation
The Royal Flying Doctor Service (Queensland) provides patient care to 95,000 people in remote communities as well as life-saving transfers to those in need of organ transplants and heart surgery. Their 19 aircraft fly more than 22,000 hours per week, 24 hours a day, spanning thousands of kilometres.
Their internal infrastructure was dated, unreliable and expensive, that hindered the quality of the emergency evacuation and transportation services they provide. Issues in network performance and security provisioning led to staff complaints and impacted on service delivery.
RFDS had recently adopted a cloud-first strategy to encourage innovation and harness technology to enhance the delivery of emergency and primary health services for patients. RFDS wanted to empower their employees with 24/7 access to find information within seconds to help them fix a problem or receive important updates. The solution would need to maintain a central point of administration for their electronic flight bag (EFB) devices, which ensure flight crew can perform flight management tasks and access critical aircraft documentation.
Charged with a mission to transform their workplace through a modern set of collaboration tools, Kloud partnered with RFDS to deliver a solution to provide flexible, transparent and simplified communications and connections across their business.
Solution
Kloud proposed a hybrid approach for deployment and adoption of Office 365 services including Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and Yammer. Utilising Telstra’s Cloud Gateway RFDS are able to leverage Microsoft Azure to host their ADFS farm and Azure AD-Connect server which is integral for this operating model. Transitioning RFDS (Queensland) to Office 365 and Azure has enabled the business to provide staff with a more robust up-to-date messaging system and Collaboration services that will lead to improved productivity and user satisfaction.
The change to Office 365 provides RFDS (Queensland) with an evergreen environment, providing more functionality and features then they ever had previously, resolved many operational and infrastructure concerns and more cost effective then running their own Exchange service. Ultimately, the solution means critical patient and business information is centrally maintained in a secure, cloud first infrastructure with multiple copies of data whether in transit or at rest. In parallel with this an additional program of work has commenced to migrate RFDS’ existing SharePoint services to SharePoint Online, which will continue to improve employee experience, though an enhanced collaboration and sharing network.
Technologies used in the solution include:
- Skype for Business Online
- Office 365 Exchange Online 2016
- OneDrive for Business
- Azure Active Directory
- Azure AD authentication system
- Exchange Server Hybrid Configuration
- Azure Tenancy
- Telstra Cloud Gateway
- Azure ExpressRoute
Benefits
- Highly available “Evergreen” cloud based solution
- Reduced administrative overhead for IT teams
- Better collaboration amongst users’ and teams’
- Efficiency gains by use of Skype for Business
- Larger user mailboxes and personal archive mailboxes in Exchange Online
Customer Testimonial
The technical resources provided have been outstanding, as well as from a teaming perspective. Kloud have often gone the extra mile for us. The RFDS business in Queensland will now benefit from utilising Office 365 as it matures into the new set of products and features. – Colin Denzel, ICT Portfolio Manager