Private South African hospital group Busamed has migrated to a private cloud environment with Datacentrix.
In doing so, the hospital group consolidated seven on-premise data centers into a single central environment.
Busamed launched in 2015, starting with four greenfield projects and purchasing three existing hospitals. It now has seven hospitals across the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and the Free State.
According to the group's IT manager, Servesan Moodley, Busamed had a complex data center setup.
“Due to our acquisitions, the organization had not only attained new businesses but had inherited the technologies used at those sites too. These were not simple ‘rip and replace’ environments, so Busamed had to phase in migration opportunities over a period of four to five years, ultimately leaving the business with multiple minor data centers," said Moodley.
“Add to this capex complexities, as each hospital operates as its own entity, and we were left with a siloed infrastructure that was inefficient, particularly from a running cost and licensing perspective, with tasks that were duplicated across the seven sites, and a complicated cyber security set-up.”
As the technology was reaching its end of life and risks were increasing, the company decided to conduct a consolidation process and move to the cloud.
The cloud migration was done in partnership with South African company Datacentrix, a hybrid ICT systems integrator and managed services provider.
Dinesh Maharaj, account manager at Datacentrix, notes that Busamed has seen significant cost and power savings.
“Our calculations showed that, by moving to a hosted cloud model, Busamed would be able to cover 46 percent of the project cost on power savings alone with normal Eskom electricity usage. This scaled up to 73 percent savings on stage four load-shedding, factoring in diesel generator usage, and again to 92 percent on a stage six schedule," said Maharaj.
“Centralized support would equate to even greater savings, as physical travel to seven sites would be reduced, where previously the requirement for an engineer at the Harrismith hospital, for example, would include costs associated with travel from either Johannesburg or Durban, as well as accommodation.”
Since the migration, Busamed has been able to achieve its requirement for a maximum of 35 minutes of downtime per year.
In the UK, the National Health Service underwent a cloud migration process. In January 2024, the NHS confirmed that all physical data centers hosting the NHS' Spine system had been decommissioned.
