The cloud enters the healthcare sector
Our success story is a group of companies in the electromedical sector, which operates in healthcare centers in Spain. The group has more than 35 years of experience and is made up of more than 800 professionals.
The group’s mission is to provide its clients with the most convenient technological solutions on the market, offering them both the maintenance and the integral technological renovation of healthcare equipment and facilities, thus contributing to improving the quality of care for users and patients.
“The group’s mission is to provide its customers with the most convenient technology solutions on the market.”
The company also excels in the implementation of medical equipment in healthcare centers. In addition, it has its own R&D&I department dedicated to researching new products and working procedures in the industrial healthcare field.
The challenge
In 2016, the Systems Department was faced with several challenges and a momentous decision, how to initiate the shift to the cloud.
The company had two main needs, the first was cost reduction in terms of both investment and operational expenses related to its mail and document management systems.
The continuous investment in system renewal, system licenses and system maintenance was too high and was not providing any return in terms of technological innovation, which in their case was very worrying in terms of competitiveness.
A second challenge was to centralize the administration points of the various mail systems of each company in the group. The administration of several systems, their dependencies, their different policy propagation times between environments, etc… reduced the agility in daily management and prevented a quality service for their users.
What did Google Workspace contribute?
Thanks to Google Workspace and its integration possibilities with the legacy systems that were to continue operating in the group, the management of the mail and collaboration system for the entire group was centralized in a single place.
In addition, Google Workspace has provided an ideal solution for staff mobility. For the first time, employees on the move have online access to information (mail, files, etc.) regardless of their location. Technicians on the road in different hospitals for installations and repairs can access all information related to their job in real time from their mobile device, without losing contact with their work teams.
Responding to one of the main initial challenges, the IT Department managed to drastically reduce fixed and operating costs by minimizing hardware investment and system maintenance tasks.
Additionally, the implementation of Google Workspace brings to the IT service some unexpected improvements such as MDM (mobile device management), SSO (federation via ADFS with its AD) or a centralized auditing system with Google Vault.
The role of the partner Altostratus Cloud Consulting
Altostratus Cloud Consulting was the Google partner responsible for the implementation of Google Workspace with an initial activation of more than 1000 accounts. The solution was executed in 3 months prioritizing the needs of mail and calendaring, and preparing its use for collaboration services.
The implementation of Google Workspace was done for all the companies of the group, with synchronization with Active Directory of the users and integration with a Federation solution (thanks to ADFS) to achieve a single sign-on portal (SSO), valid for other applications of the company.
The consulting firm helped the company in the whole process of platform migration and in the adoption of new cloud tools for a more efficient and collaborative work.
Why Google Cloud?
Google Cloud really offered a 100% cloud-based solution with very clear advantages, both from the user’s point of view as well as user management and administration; the inclusion of archiving services, MDM (mobile device management), integrations with their current systems from different manufacturers or the possibility of adding SaaS applications from third parties fully parameterized from the Google Workspace Suite management console.
Thanks to Altostratus Cloud Consulting and Google Cloud technology, the group was able to start its digitalization process, providing a better service to its customers, optimizing its internal processes and meeting its initial cost reduction objective.
