Healthy Hybrid Cloud Helps Municipality Deliver High Quality Medical Services
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform
- NETSCOUT nGenius Packet Flow Switch (PFS)
- NETSCOUT InfiniStream appliance
Tech Stack
- IoT
- Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C)
- Virtualization
- Cloud
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Cities & Municipalities
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
The customer is a California government agency that is the second largest integrated municipal health care system in the United States. The agency operates over 19 health centers and clinics, four hospitals, and has an annual operating budget of $4 billion. The agency employs over 19,000 people that provide world-class health care to over 670,000 patients annually. The agency's IT infrastructure is a critical component of its operations, supporting the delivery of health care services to its patients. The agency's IT services and applications are essential for the caregivers to provide patient care. The agency's IT professionals need to make real-time decisions in a highly agile and evolving environment, similar to the health care staff.
The Challenge
The California government agency, being the second largest integrated municipal health care system in the United States, faced several challenges. The agency needed to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT), Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), virtualization, cloud and continuous software delivery. Moreover, endemic digital services vital to health care providers include electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as well. And that’s not all. Oracle® databases, Microsoft Exchange® email services, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives and policies are essential for health care provider teams and the industry at large. Thus, the requirement to have comprehensive end-to-end visibility of the entire IT infrastructure is mandated by the seamless flow of crucial, mission- and patient-critical data. In fact, EMR requests alone are literally made millions of times a day. As complexity grows with digital systems and automation, so does the opportunity for things going wrong anywhere along the service-delivery path and this can severely diminish patient care. That means the IT organization must get ahead of service performance problems before they become health care problems. Some of the specific challenges this Southern California agency grappled with are: Understanding capacity utilization, Automatic, end-to-end awareness of all service dependencies and interrelationships within the IT chain, Maintaining an evolving IT infrastructure, Automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes, Isolating and resolving service-delivery infrastructure problems, Clinical application availability 24/7/365, Contextual analysis for applications and digital services.
The Solution
The agency chose the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform including the InfiniStream appliance and nGenius PFS for its unparalleled ability to monitor, organize and visualize traffic data necessary to manage and measure IT infrastructure and services. Powered by its powerful Adaptive Service Intelligence™ (ASI) engine, the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE platform addresses service assurance challenges with smarter data and superior analytics. By inspecting traffic data continuously and analyzing large volumes of data at high velocity for complex, distributed IT services, NETSCOUT helps the Southern California health care agency solve performance issues before they impact health care services. Moreover, the agency leveraged a combination of PFS Mode on each InfiniStream and VLAN tagging on the nGenius PFS switches to isolate traffic data and create additional physical interfaces needed for comprehensive visibility and reporting. The solution entailed several important adjustments including the appending of VLAN tags at the nGenius PFS switch to abstract the physical topology and to thus eliminate congestion. At the InfiniStream, the PFS Mode allowed the association of the appended VLAN tags with a unique physical interface. Lastly, the agency also has the ability to run Link Usage reports on the newly created VLAN physical PFS interfaces.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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