Whanau Tahi: Modernising family care across Aotearoa

Amid a national crisis, Whānau Tahi's customers embraced digital systems and the demand to provide a seamlessly integrated experience amplified. The challenge was on for Whānau Tahi to upgrade their on-premises platform, reduce bottlenecks and ensure the smooth coordination and delivery of family health care.

Introduction

Whānau Tahi develops technology solutions used by health and social services organisations to enhance the coordination and delivery of family care, particularly within indigenous Māori communities. Its customers include Government and community agencies, primary and allied healthcare providers and funding providers in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.

To ensure service stability, scalability and security, Whānau Tahi sought to modernise its IT operating environment to take full advantage of the cloud. Crayon owned subsidiary, Parallo, was selected to execute a migration to Microsoft Azure and provide ongoing support services for the new cloud environment.

Challenge

The pandemic drove a rapid shift to digital first healthcare and social services delivery in Whānau Tahi's home market of New Zealand. As its customers adopted new digital systems to cope with the national crisis, the requirement to integrate with Whānau Tahi’s platform and applications intensified, placing existing resources under considerable pressure.

Whānau Tahi’s ability to respond was hindered by an aging on-premises platform that could not readily scale. Integrations were slow and as workloads rapidly multiplied, it became harder to maintain service performance standards.

Why Parallo and Crayon

Crayon's Parallo business unit specialises in helping independent software vendors (ISVs) like Whānau Tahi to transform IT operations and scale their businesses. The team proposed a cost-effective, flexible solution that would leverage Microsoft Azure to deliver a highly scalable, secure and compliant cloud-first environment for Whānau Tahi.

The team demonstrated a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by independent providers like Whānau Tahi. A track record of successful Azure migrations and a strategic alliance with Microsoft gave Whānau Tahi further confidence in the solution approach, implementation rigor and ongoing support capabilities available through Crayon.

Solution

The migration of the legacy on-premises stack to Azure IaaS and PaaS commenced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in May, 2020. Implementation of the project was staged over the following 18 months. The project included the set up of the landing environment within the cloud, and migration of Connected Care and Socrates; proprietary workloads for needs assessment and service coordination, and integrated case management applications.

The largest workload to migrate was the New Zealand Electronic Prescription Service (NZePS), which is developed and managed by Whānau Tahi on behalf of the NZ Ministry of Health.

Parallo utilised Azure DevOps - a comprehensive set of development tools offered by Microsoft – to manage the build, test and deployment processes. Source code, tracking of work items and task coordination were also centrally managed through Azure DevOps. Monitoring, logging and performance tracking were set up to reduce bottlenecks and ensure optimised resource utilisation during and after the migration.

The inherent security features, compliance domains and policy controls of the Azure platform, including those for secure development operations, were configured and tested against all required national compliance domains and controls.

Outcome

Whānau Tahi now has a modern, flexible, and highly tooled cloud technology stack geared to support consistent, repeatable and dependable development processes and service delivery.

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