Executive summary
Challenge: The Informática Médica Group is a company dedicated to the development of information tools for the health sector. They needed to centralise control of their application management in order to allow universal access for their users.
Solution: Claranet moved Informática Médica to a Hosted Desktop solution, Claranet’s virtual desktop and application platform that allows companies to shift their jobs over to a cloud-based model.
Result: Informática Médica Group now benefits from remote access on any device, a scalable and flexible platform, efficient OpEx spend, centralisation of updates and compliance with all Spanish and EU data security and protection laws.
Informática Médica
The Informática Médica Group is a joint company dedicated to the development of information tools for the health sector. Since 1988, it has delivered software development, hardware consultancy, user education and customer service on all of its products, offering a comprehensive service to doctors and professionals.
The relationship between Informática Médica and Claranet began in 2013, when the software company was looking for a new cloud provider after two non-starters. Up until then, Informática Médica had delivered its programmes via traditional means: installation, updates and maintenance on the client’s premises, taking on the costs themselves that this approach entails. And that’s why they decided to get in touch with Claranet: they needed to migrate their Gesmed Edition and Sinapsis applications to a guaranteed stable cloud platform.
The challenge
The main objective of the project was clear: to centralise control of the software (maintenance, changes and updates) and enable universal access for the user. This entailed virtualising the applications on a cloud platform that would facilitate remote working and ‘as a service’ consumption.
However, this particular technical approach entailed a series of legal and logistical considerations. On the one hand, the medical data stored in the applications are subject to rigorous privacy and trust contracts, such that maximum security for the platform that stores them is required at all times. On the other, Informática Médica’s customers, many of whom are doctors who visit different clinics and homes, had to be able to access the applications from any location and via any device.
Silvio Sunyer, the Director of Informática Médica, explained that :
Our customers are highly dependent on the application. The doctors are in their practice one day, at a congress the next, and need continuous access to it. If the application doesn’t work they don’t know what patients are coming, or if a patient has an allergy or not.”
The pressure is extremely high: for our customers five minutes without service is unacceptable. Claranet understood our situation from the beginning and bent over backwards to make sure their solution matched our needs. Now we function wonderfully and it’s precisely those customers who aren’t in the cloud who are asking us to make the jump.”
The solution
Given these requirements, the ideal service for Informática Médica was Hosted Desktop, Claranet’s virtual desktop and application platform that allows companies to shift their jobs over to a cloud-based model. The central pillars of the proposed solution
were as follows:
• High-availability Citrix platform for virtualisation and remote access to the Gesmed and Sinapsis applications
• Cloud solution located in Claranet’s Spanish data centres, complying with Spanish data protection laws, ISO 27000 and other security standards
• Services for the protection of data, including SSL encryption, perimeter firewall systems, comprehensive backup and a secondary data centre
• 24x7x365 management, monitoring and technical support
The result
Taking the step from the traditional way of working to the ‘as a service’ model has allowed Informática Médica to manage their software in a more efficient way and to offer a more agile service to its end users. Claranet’s solution has delivered the following advantages to the end user:
1. Remote access on any device
2. The scalable and flexible platform grows and shrinks continuously in line with demand
3. Pay only for resources used
4. Save on costs related to software updates and changes, which become centralised
5. Compliant with all Spanish and EU data security and protection laws