This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: FastTrack Blog articles.
This blog was written by Roman Avanesyan, Practice Director, Microsoft Productivity and Infrastructure at SADA Systems, who presented with Ashish Sharma, Senior Systems Consultant at Visiting Nurse Service of New York during Microsoft Ignite 2018.
During our Ignite 2018 session, we described a modernization and standardization project that SADA Systems led with Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY). But first, a little background: VNSNY has been caring for patients for more than 125 years. Founded by Lillian Wald, the first public health nurse in the United States, the not-for-profit organization now cares for more than 30,000 patients a day through various home-based and community-based programs.
In 2016, VNSNY recognized it had hit a roadblock with its IT infrastructure and it needed to modernize. In the field, clinicians had to keep track of passwords and usernames for multiple apps and rely on patients’ home internet connectivity for data collection and transfers. At headquarters, the small IT team struggled to answer an excess of password-related support calls while managing costly onsite servers along with software as a service (SaaS) licensing and service agreements across vendors. VNSNY needed a more manageable and unified environment to support its clinicians and programs. As a result, it decided to standardize on Microsoft Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security.
Enter FastTrack Ready Partner - SADA Systems
VNSNY wanted to move quickly, but its small IT team was busy helping workers and maintaining servers and did not have the resources to tackle an IT change management project. The Microsoft account team referred VNSNY to Microsoft FastTrack, who entrusted the project to an expert implementation partner in Office 365 migration, SADA Systems.
Together, VNSNY and the SADA Systems FastTrack migration team set to work: building a business case, establishing objectives, evaluating IT infrastructure, and creating a migration roadmap. At the outset, we needed to simplify VNSNY’s IT responsibilities and consolidate service agreements across fewer vendors. In addition, we had to help VNSNY maintain its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance obligations. With security and compliance top of mind, we implemented a cloud-based identity management service through Microsoft Azure and eventually deployed Enterprise Mobility + Security for identity management and mobile device management.
To address the headache of numerous usernames and passwords, we enabled self-service password reset, single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication with Azure Active Directory. For the migration itself, we worked hard to avoid any disruption to VNSNY clinicians’ work by moving mailboxes at night, after the last shift ended. Our strategy prevented clinicians from losing access to their mailboxes and helped us stick to our migration schedule.
At the end of the day, an organization’s change drivers are its employees. Our team provided VNSNY with FastTrack change management best practices, and in tandem with the migration, SADA Systems developed a workshop to bring executives together to identify business use cases and to understand IT modernization goals.
We accomplished a successful migration of 12,000 active user accounts and 16,000 active and inactive mailboxes for VNSNY without any delays. SADA’s FastTrack team provided the expertise VNSNY needed to get the most out of its cloud solutions while saving the VNSNY IT team several months’ worth of work. FastTrack offers tremendous value for any organization, especially for a not-for-profit like VNSNY, which now benefits from ongoing cost savings and a simplified IT infrastructure. Moreover, VNSNY clinicians have a better set of tools to fulfill their mission: to provide 30,000 patients with personalized healthcare every day, so that the entire community can thrive.
If you would like to hear more about our story, watch our presentation from Microsoft Ignite. We’d love to hear from you in the comments if you have any questions.
Thank you, Roman, for authoring this blog post and speaking at Ignite. Learn more about FastTrack for Microsoft 365 and watch the Visiting Nurse Service of New York session from Microsoft Ignite: FastTrack and SADA Systems: Guiding Visiting Nurse Service of New York to a successful deployment.