Cloud services help drive The Fred Hollows Foundation

DXC Technology’s IT relationship with The Fred Hollows Foundation has seen two successful cloud migrations over a 4-year period as The Foundation strives to eliminate avoidable blindness and improve the health outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Most recently, DXC successfully migrated all of The Foundation’s main applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with minimal business impact and noticeable gains in performance.

The Fred Hollows Foundation, founded in 1992, carries on the work of the late Professor Fred Hollows in 25 countries around the world. In its most successful year to date, The Foundation supported over one million eye operations and treatments in 2016. It was also able to support the training of more than 75,000 eye doctors, nurses and health professionals, and the distribution of antibiotics for trachoma to more than 18 million people.

The rapid growth has presented IT challenges for The Foundation, which has a diverse and mobile global workforce that relies on IT services and technology.

Like many organizations The Foundation has faced the challenge of a legacy environment of on-premises applications and fixed infrastructure. Unlike larger commercial global organizations however, The Foundation was not willing to invest precious donations in expensive international networks and IT infrastructure. The Foundation also operates in some challenging environments in developing countries, so it needed expertise to tackle complexity, while also being cost-sensitive.

What was needed was a provider able to deliver a more flexible, responsive and affordable option to replace existing on-site infrastructure and work with The Foundation to build a scalable and affordable operating model. This new model had to include flexible pricing and high levels of security while still making appropriate data available to staff across its locations.

A customized, agile and supportive service

To manage these challenges back in 2013, DXC offered The Foundation its DXC Cloud and Platform Services expertise. Over a 3-month period, DXC successfully moved The Foundation’s business applications to a more agile, OPEX-based virtual private cloud environment.

The next iteration of the cloud journey

Over the past 2 years, The Foundation has been improving and upgrading its business systems. At the same time, The Foundation’s overseas operations were expanding, and new public cloud options were becoming available. The Fred Hollows Foundation wanted to ensure it stayed at the forefront of these technological changes and was able to take full advantage of potential benefits in price, performance and reliability to achieve its objectives without increasing expenditures.

The Foundation looked to DXC to guide it on the next step on its cloud journey.

“With $25 AUD, The Fred Hollows Foundation can restore a person’s eye sight, so when you provide IT services at a cost, one important thing to keep in mind is what it can achieve with just $25”, says David Tait, AWS Practice Executive ANZ at DXC Technology. “We needed to provide The Foundation with a technology outcome that would represent the best value and deliver ongoing savings – every dollar counted.”

The DXC AWS Practice developed a business case that addressed each of The Foundation’s IT objectives. DXC worked to migrate its environment to AWS and adopt DXC AWS Managed Services, including additional operating system support and security services. DXC managed the complexity and interdependencies involved with the large migration from one platform to another and minimized the business impact on The Foundation while undergoing this technology rollout.

A wide range of benefits

The pilot migration to AWS was successful in testing and refining the technical solution, tools and processes. This was then followed by a full migration of The Foundation’s IT landscape, which took only 2 months and was completed in March 2018.

“The Fred Hollows Foundation has relied on DXC for nearly four years to provide our core infrastructure services under a private cloud model,” says Luke van Leeuwen, director of Information and Management Technology at The Fred Hollows Foundation.

“This year, we made the transition from DXC’s traditional cloud to the public cloud in AWS, with continued support from DXC to manage and execute the migration project and the ongoing environment in DXC’s AWS Managed Service.

“We have successfully migrated all of our main on-premises business applications into AWS with minimal business impact and noticeable gains in performance. We are confident that this change will provide real benefits in terms of resilience, cost, performance and accessibility across our global organizations.”

The Foundation now has considerable peace of mind, knowing that DXC and AWS manage its IT services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

DXC Technology and AWS

DXC is a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and is an audited AWS Managed Service Provider. DXC maintains multiple AWS Competencies, demonstrating technical proficiency with proven success accelerating enterprise customers’ adoption of AWS. DXC has more than 8,000 AWS accreditations, among the highest in the industry. In addition, DXC holds more than 900 AWS certifications, with plans to double that number.