Skip to content
Customer Story

Cloud migration and application migration: a structured process towards a solid and reliable application environment.

Dutch health provider ZuidZorg successfully migrates old systems to the cloud in under three months
{body={src=https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/697348/Zuid%20Zorg.svg}, css={}, child_css={}, id=client_logo, name=client_logo, type=image_src, order=8, smart_type=null, styles={}}

Related services
Cloud

Industry
Healthcare

Company
Oblivion | Part of Xebia

The customer.

ZuidZorg is a Dutch healthcare company that provides home-centred healthcare services for seniors across the Netherlands. For more than five years, Oblivion has helped enterprises across Europe move critical business applications to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Because of its success working with AWS, Oblivion has become a Premier Consulting Partner and a Public Sector Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). “We chose to partner with AWS because of its mature ecosystem and speed of innovation as well as the reliability of its services,” says Jeroen Jacobs, project manager and cloud consultant for Oblivion. “By partnering with AWS, we can confidently help our customers adopt cloud technology and do business more cost-effectively.”
Why
Replace aging hardware to increase flexibility and meet employee demands
What
Migrate healthcare apps to AWS cloud infrastructure
How
Simplifying the overall IT environment

The challenge.

Increasingly, the company’s public sector customers, including healthcare organizations, are seeking more flexibility to meet employee demands. For example, ZuidZorg needed to give nurses and other workers more flexible and better-performing tools. “Our application infrastructure was based in two data centers that had aging hardware,” says Dionysis Linardatos, IT manager at ZuidZorg.

“As a result, we had performance problems with both software and hardware. Applications weren’t reliable and that created problems for nurses. For instance, when nurses took online video training, the video was very slow to load. Nurses also had challenges quickly opening the healthcare applications they depend on every day, which meant they could not spend as much time with patients.”

ZuidZorg developed a plan to move its collocated servers to AWS, implement a universal cloud identity management tool, replace laptops, eliminate its desktop virtualization software, and migrate to a cloud application suite. To implement its plan, ZuidZorg turned to Oblivion. “ZuidZorg had the vision to become completely cloud-based,” says Jacobs. “We knew we could help.”

The approach.

After consulting closely with ZuidZorg on a cloud migration plan, Oblivion began to implement an AWS foundation and, following this implementation, the process of moving the customer’s key applications to AWS. Using AWS Server Migration Service (AWS SMS), Oblivion moved dozens of ZuidZorg applications—including healthcare business applications, employee databases, and a business intelligence system—to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Oblivion also used its own Cloud Foundation service, which quickly enables the setup of secure, scalable, multi-account AWS environments. “Relying on our Cloud Foundation, including AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices, we quickly created a structure with separate logging, backup, audit, and production accounts for different ZuidZorg business units,” says Jacobs. Additionally, Oblivion took advantage of its AWS APN partnership status to integrate solutions from AWS APN partners Okta and Trend Micro. Specifically, Oblivion used Okta for Cloud Identity Management to give ZuidZorg secure access to applications and to arrange access to AWS.

The company also took advantage of Trend Micro Deep Security for its antivirus capabilities. Oblivion relies on AWS Lambda to automatically integrate the ZuidZorg HR application with Okta for Cloud Identity Management. The overall migration from the ZuidZorg data centers to AWS took less than three months, which was faster than ZuidZorg expected.

In the migration’s final phase, Oblivion helped ZuidZorg become fully web-enabled by implementing the Amazon AppStream 2.0 managed application streaming service and Amazon WorkSpaces, a secure cloud desktop service. Through these two solutions, ZuidZorg can easily provision Windows client-based applications to mobile employees. As a result, nurses and other workers can quickly access training videos and critical healthcare applications.

"Our entire application environment is much more robust and performs better now that it is based in the AWS Cloud instead of in a data center."
Zuid Zorg
Dionysis Linardatos IT Manager at ZuidZorg

The solution.

Improving the Patient Experience through Better Performance. With its new cloud solution, ZuidZorg is empowering its employees to spend more time with patients. “Our entire application environment is much more robust and performs better now that it is based in the AWS Cloud instead of in a data center,” Linardatos states. “Everything is more reliable, which means nurses are not frustrated by application performance problems. Because they can access healthcare applications faster on AWS, our nurses will spend more of their time at a patient’s bedside delivering better care.”

The result.

Cutting Operational Costs by 50 percent. ZuidZorg simplified its overall environment by migrating to AWS, changing laptops, eliminating virtualization software, and moving to a new collaboration suite. With these changes, ZuidZorg is saving money. “We are saving more than 50 percent on operational costs because we have eliminated complexity,” says Linardatos. “The aim of this project was to become a fully web-based healthcare organization, and we have achieved that with the help of Oblivion and AWS.”

As it continues to assist customers in their cloud migration journeys, Oblivion plans to take advantage of new AWS services as they become available. “Knowledge is one of the biggest benefits we get from our AWS APN partnership,” says Jacobs. “We are constantly learning more about new technologies and new AWS services, and this will help us accelerate our business.”

Explore related customer stories

Questions?

Get in touch with us

Contact us