CASE STUDY
Nuffield Health is the UK ’ s largest healthcare charity . As an organisation with no shareholders , Nuffield Health invests all its income back into its core objective of building a healthier nation . This is achieved through day-to-day services across 31 award-winning hospitals , 113 fitness and well-being clubs , healthcare clinics and over 200 workplace well-being services .
In its broader community role , Nuffield Health offers flagship programmes that help improve the lives of children with Cystic Fibrosis ( CF ) through free exercise classes – and supports the world ’ s largest research project into how exercise can aid prostate cancer recovery . It also partners with schools to provide thousands of pupils with free timetabled programmes to improve their health and well-being .
The challenge
Before engaging Node4 , Nuffield Health hosted its website and digital services on a managed physical platform but was looking to modernise the infrastructure , while improving its peak-time performance and availability .
The IT team had started to use Microsoft Azure for some development environments , as well as selected data integrations and exchanges . They could see the advantages of moving nuffieldhealth . com to Azure too . It would cut costs associated with over-provisioning , simplify and speed up website modernisation and enable the creation of new digital services . Microsoft , too , was making a solid case for complete migration . It was a compelling , costsaving argument that went to the heart of the charity ’ s operations – and it was getting harder to ignore each time the website faltered or crashed .
“ We ’ d done the sums and knew that an Azure migration could save us a lot of money , both upfront and in the long term , as well as improve performance . We had attempted to rearchitect services ourselves , but that approach didn ’ t work for us ,” said Dave Ankers , IT Strategy and Delivery Director at Nuffield Health . “ Needing to resolve this rapidly , we asked Microsoft if it could assist us and it came back with just one recommendation – Node4 . The rest , as they say , is history .”
The solution
Node4 ’ s first task was to devise an Azure migration strategy . At its core , this was a ‘ lift and shift ’ move , but Node4 also rearchitected and optimised nuffieldhealth . com so that the IT team could take full advantage of Azure ’ s services , infrastructure and wider ecosystem .
Each stage of the project focused on keeping operational disruptions to a minimum . First of all , Node4 spent time with Nuffield Health ’ s IT team to catalogue the charity ’ s digital assets and applications – and understand how ( or the extent to which ) they were integrated . No one wanted to leave a website , asset , or associated application behind – and inadvertently cause a service outage . Then , when everything had been checked and confirmed , Node4 carried out several dry runs ahead of the actual website migration to ensure it would go smoothly .
“ I don ’ t want to sound flippant , but the most positive thing I can say is that no one outside my department – say , for example , a director of one of our hospitals – noticed the switch over ,” said Ankers . “ The project went smoothly with a first-time , flawless cutover of all digital services in a single overnight maintenance window . Migrating a website like ours with all the interlocking and dependent services is no easy task – and can cause huge operational disruption – but Node4 managed it with ease and minimal fuss .”
The results
Website resilience straight from the cloud
The previous web hosting infrastructure had a finite scaling capability . Even with the large sums spent on hardware over-provisioning , some peak usage periods pushed it beyond breaking point and crashed the site . “ Our services are , by their nature , prone to peaks and troughs of demand ,” said Ankers . “ Our managed hardware infrastructure couldn ’ t cope with the demands being placed on it – and our budget was not able to stretch to cover the continual over-provisioning that would be required to meet peaks .”
Over-provisioning had been essential because Nuffield Health ’ s website has very definite and pronounced daily activity spikes . Classically , they ’ d happened in the early morning when Health Fitness &
WE ASKED MICROSOFT IF IT COULD ASSIST US AND IT CAME BACK WITH JUST ONE RECOMMENDATION – NODE4 . THE REST , AS THEY SAY , IS HISTORY .
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