WA aged care group gets rid of legacy IT in cloud move

Juniper Aged Care has been moving all its systems to the cloud in what has so far been a 12-month project that will help it dedicate more funds to support its 4,000 Western Australian residents.

With 26 premises in Western Australia, Juniper Aged Care decided to start moving all its applications to the cloud as it moved away from a local data centre. The move of applications to the cloud is the first step of a complete IT refresh that is expected to see the organisation benefit from less IT costs in the long term.

The challenges Juniper Aged Care faced moving to the cloud

Juniper ICT manager Dan Beeston calls it a 12-month exercise for a reason. As the aged care organisation decided to move from its Dell server environment—of eight blades and a storage area netwoerk (SAN)—with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation and 175 Windows servers all networked with Cisco switching, it opted for Amazon Web Services as it found it offered “significant” opportunities in data and analytics through available microservices.

However, not everything was cloud-ready. Beeston explained to Computerworld Australia that Juniper had some legacy software running on operating systems that no longer had support, so it had to work with some of its vendors to find a solution as not all were able to connect to AWS.

The result was a lot of extra work from Juniper’s IT team across multiple applications:

• It worked with the vendor of the budgeting app to manually install it on AWS. “The vendor was averse to supporting Amazon Relational Database Service [RDS], so we continued with SQL instance as localhost until we can review their SaaS offering at a later date,” Beeston said.
• The training record system could not be migrated to AWS, so the records were migrated to a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) learning management (LMS) system.
• Juniper was using two versions each of its rostering and reporting tools; these were merged into the existing cloud version so there was no need for a localy hosted software.
• The vendor for the existing ERP did not support Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), so Juniper worked with the vendor to make the system AWS-compatible.
• Juniper also refactored its identity management system into a new one system, and “we rebuilt the code to replicate the existing then we will review and enhance,” Beeston said.

How Juniper ensured compliance with governance requirements

To simplify its response to the sector’s compliance and governance requirements, Juniper decided to centralise critical data into a single risk-management platform, ionMy, which required integration with other systems including clinical care software iCare, ERP software from Epicor, payroll software from Chris21 and Okta’s identity and access management.

Having used some of these for years, Juniper found that it had limited documentation at hand, and the complexity made it hard to troubleshoot when needed. The IT team decided to explore using a central integration platform, something that had not been done previously.

To automate the integration of these systems, Juniper selected Boomi’s integration platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as it could break down data silos by integrating on-premises and cloud applications. Juniper uses Boomi AtomSphere to integrate its on-premises applications in its AWS infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) architecture and to push this integration into online SaaS applications.

“One of my key concerns was that I didn’t want the solution to require a dedicated integration developer—not only would this be a significant additional expense, but it would severely impact business continuity when they left the business,” Beeston said.

Now, Juniper has significantly cut the time it takes to produce reports, which results in keeping up with governance and compliance as well as more regular updates to board members.

Juniper Aged Care improved business productivity as a result of IT changes

Since the completion of the initial IT changes and upgrades, Juniper has seen improved productivity and can direct more resources to resident and client care.

“Prior, each of our ten key systems had its own set of credentials, so caregivers would have to log in ten different times, remember ten separate passwords and enter the same data multiple times. This has all been replaced by a single sign-on,” Beeston said.

Juniper has also replaced thousands of desktop terminals with mobile tablets so caregivers can spend more time interacting with the residents as they can enter data while with residents rather than having to dedicate time doing data entry behind a desk.

The aged care group is now reviewing its legacy processes, optimising and remediating them into Boomi. It plans to implement Boomi’s Master Data Hub, a tool that lets you integrate, map, and clean data across siloed prcesses,  to gain full visibility across its systems.