Key Facts: 

• V2 helped modernise the key application and platform for a prominent medical services and research organisation that delivers world-leading health outcomes

• V2 helped to reduce infrastructure delivery from 14 days to 30 minutes and eliminated authentication timeframes from 5 business days to 10 minutes

• All manual interactions were removed, and V2 implemented new Ways of Working that demonstrated clear value to the business by accelerating team velocity and quality

• Optimisation was completed to unlock large cost savings

The Client: Essential Medical Services for Australians 

A prominent medical services and research organisation provides products and services that deliver world-leading health outcomes. The essential nature of this organisation’s services to Australians requires critical business applications to be highly secure, agile and with high operational maturity. 

As an organisation, it is critical to the healthcare of Australians that they deliver what they promise, provide the highest levels of safety and quality, and maintain the trust of communities.

The Challenge: A critical need to increase agility for the business

Business and customer-facing teams often view the internal ICT team as a bottleneck that constrains the effective and timely project delivery and technology outcomes required by the organisation and its external stakeholders.  

IT teams have sometimes struggled with aligned requirements and optimal handoffs between stakeholder groups.  Where a project needs to leverage and consume cloud, software or data services, there was no consistent or effective way to deliver that outcome. 

Critical business applications required highly secure, agile provisioning in multiple environments coupled with operational maturity at all times across areas such as monitoring, logging and alerting. The availability of experienced personnel with the necessary knowledge and skills is limited.

The Solution: Alignment, Automation and Team Maturity

V2 assisted in the design and deployment of scalable platform-product offerings, leveraging cloud providers such as AWS and tooling from Hashicorp, including Terraform. Authentication, observability, logging, alerting and monitoring capabilities were also uplifted through consistent platform engineering standards being applied across multiple environments.  A number of necessary internal development products were identified, designed and built for simple and consistent consumption as and when required.  Examples included:  

• Self service Windows Servers compliant to organisational security standards across AWS and Azure cloud infrastructure 

• Automated SSH secret rotation to uplift security posture and reduce vulnerability risk

• Monitoring and Alerting framework integrated with the organisation’s existing communications platform

• Automated pipelines leveraging best practice Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to standardise deployments of new infrastructure, platforms and products

• Patterns and templates to accelerate the onboarding and commencement of new projects requiring ICT infrastructure

• Integrated security authentication between Azure DevOps and AWS
  

Specific technology components and services leveraged to achieve these outcomes included but were not limited to: 

• Terraform

• Azure DevOps

• EC2 / Azure VM’s

• Simple Notification Service (SNS)

• Amazon Secrets Manager

• Azure KeyVault 

• OIDC id

In addition to these more technically focussed outcomes, engineering teams were also upskilled across new technology and modern ways of working to accelerate the effective provisioning of cloud services and software platforms.  This changed mindsets away from traditional infrastructure engineering to a highly customer-focused “platform as a product” mentality that is readably capable of supporting strategic organisational objectives. 

Delivering Value: Business Agility across ICT

As a result of the close collaboration with V2, our customer;

• Reduced original service delivery time of 14 days to 30 minutes.

• Eliminated all manual interaction required across key infrastructure 

• Decreased Costs with increased transparency and visibility for the business across technology dimensions

• Reduced the time required to establish authentication between Azure and AWS environments from 5 business days to 10 minutes

Knowledge transfer and IP retention with new Ways of Working that demonstrated clear value to the business by accelerating the team's velocity and quality. This included the advancement of their Team Topology implementation.