DXC Technology’s IT relationship with The Fred Hollows Foundation has led to 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 cloud services experts 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, including Australia.
The Foundation has supported more than 1 million eye operations and treatments, as well as funded the training of tens of thousands of eye doctors, nurses and other health professionals. It also has funded the distribution of antibiotics for trachoma to millions of people.
“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.”
Luke van Leeuwen Director of Information and Management Technology, The Fred Hollows Foundation
Building up, watching costs
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 organisations The Foundation has faced the challenge of a legacy environment of on-premises applications and fixed infrastructure. However, it 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 making appropriate data available to staff across its locations.
To manage these challenges, DXC offered The Foundation its Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud and Cloud Strategy and Migration 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.
“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 organisations.”
Luke van Leeuwen Director of Information and Management Technology, The Fred Hollows Foundation
The next iteration of the cloud journey
The Foundation has been improving and upgrading its business systems. It wanted to ensure it stayed at the forefront of technology changes, such as the advent of new public cloud options, as its overseas operations expanded. It wanted to be 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 cloud consulting services to guide it on the next step of its cloud journey. “With $25, The Fred Hollows Foundation can restore a person’s eyesight, so when you provide IT services at a cost, one important thing to keep in mind is what they can achieve with just $25,” says David Tait, AWS practice executive for 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.”
DXC developed a business case for AWS that addressed each of The Foundation’s IT objectives. DXC is a Premier AWS Partner and Managed Service Provider, with AWS Big Data, Migrations and SAP competencies. DXC worked to migrate its environment to AWS and adopt DXC Public Cloud managed services for AWS, including additional operating system support and infrastructure security services.
DXC managed the complexity and interdependencies involved with the large migration from one platform to another and minimised the business impact on The Foundation during this technology rollout.
Value delivered
Gains in performance resiliency
The pilot migration to AWS was successful in testing and refining the technical solution, tools and processes. This effort was then followed by a full migration of The Foundation’s IT landscape, which took only 2 months.
“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.
“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 organisations.”
The Foundation now has considerable peace of mind, knowing that DXC and AWS manage its IT services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.