As Housing Works grew and acquired other organizations, they were suddenly hosting 60 servers on-premises and two large data systems, one of which had grown even more with the addition of medical billing. The result was an infrastructure that could not keep up, which impacted performance and uptime. With so many employees depending on the system, downtime of only a few minutes here and there could add up very quickly.
“We have our own data warehouse,” said Chanchal Gandhwani, Vice President for Data and Software Applications for Housing Works. “We have many locations, and the lifeline of Housing Works is our data system. Because our infrastructure was not designed to scale at that level when we brought processes in-house and changed other processes many years ago, it was not sustainable.”
Sometime earlier, they attempted to address the issues by outsourcing all IT functions to another firm. However, there were many issues with that solution, and Housing Works had also decided they no longer wanted to continue trying to stay current on their own hardware, so they decided to migrate their data to the cloud—and put out an RFP to find a partner to help.
After reviewing responses, Chanchal and the team narrowed the field down to three, one of which was HSO (then AKA). While all three offered very similar pricing, HSO stood out in two key ways, as explained by Gandhwani:
“HSO was ready to come into our premises. They were willing to do pre-scanning and pre-finding without even having a contract in place because they wanted to understand more before committing or asking us to commit. HSO was fine with first just providing us with a report of what was wrong and what could and could not be done. They came to our office for, I think, two days, and scanned our network, then provided a report and then a proposal to move everything from our on-premises to cloud servers.”
Second, Jolanta and Lasha had very positive things to say regarding previous and current engagements—and the relationship that had been established.
HSO began work on delivering a viable, cost-effective solution by moving the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure in a multi-phased approach. The first phase would involve moving the business-critical systems including GP, migrating the data center, and providing hybrid network connectivity. This would eliminate all on-premises infrastructure and applications so Housing Works could operate 100 percent in the cloud.