Optus brings nursing service to the cloud
Optus has added another corporate customer to its cloud computing roster, with South Australia's Royal District Nursing Service (RDNS) signing up to use the telco's facility to support its disaster recovery functions.
Along with rivals such as Telstra, Fujitsu, CSC and recently HP, Optus launched its own cloud computing infrastructure last year, aiming to deliver infrastructure as a service solution based in Australia to local organisations. All of the major local cloud computing providers have announced their first customers on the services, with the first to trial the Optus cloud being Curtin University and property services company Savills. Now, Optus can add another name to that list — one of its existing customers has adopted its cloud solutions.
In a statement, the telco said RDNS, which is a not-for-profit organisation delivering community-based healthcare, recently kicked off a project to consolidate four primary business facilities into a single head office in Keswick, South Australia. "This new Head Office will serve as the central hub for support functions and services such as IT, Telephony and its Contact Centre, and will also support ten smaller satellite branch locations delivering metropolitan community," said Optus.
"Rather than procure additional IT equipment, RDNS will use the Optus Cloud as its secondary virtual disaster recovery facility from April. It will support failover and failback processes for more than 20 core business applications should RDNS' primary site go down. Using the online self-service portal, RDNS will be able to self-orchestrate its disaster recovery site and deploy resources/services as needed."
Jodie Rugless, the chief information officer for RDNS, said the telco provided "a more cost-effective disaster recovery solution" that would give the healthcare provider full server protection, and the ability to execute failover/failback within minutes rather than hours.
After a flurry of announcements last year, it has been several months since the largest Australian cloud providers announced any major customers. Telstra is known to have signed up industrial equipment manufacturer Kohmatsu, as well as packaging giant Visy. Fujitsu inked a deal with Toyota in February, which will see the company's TUNE Dealership Management System used by dealerships across Australia on the Japanese IT giant's systems.