For over three decades , Saudi German Health has firmly established itself as a leading private healthcare provider in the Middle East and North Africa ( MENA ). As part of the HSB Holding Company – the largest healthcare group in Saudi Arabia – Saudi German Health prides itself as an industry pioneer and has achieved this by offering world-class treatment and facilities , backed by industry leading technologies . For this reason , IT plays a pivotal role in every aspect of the company ’ s operations – from patient-facing services , to mission-critical back-end processes .

Years of continued and significant investment into technologies – each of which was cutting-edge at its time of implementation – had left Saudi German Health with a complex IT infrastructure . “ We have a number of decentralised clusters built on legacy , hardware-based servers and storage technologies from several different vendors ,” explained Hamza Sobhi Batterjee , President , HSB Holding .

With virtualisation on these platforms also being made possible by solutions from different vendors , the IT team found it ‘ impossible ’ to migrate VMs between clusters . “ With no ability for centralised monitoring of our environment , the complexity of day-to-day management was considerable and this effort was compounded by the on-going need to manage so many licenses , support contracts and of course , hardware and upgrade cycles ,” he added .

But more so than these challenges for the IT team , it was the risk posed to the availability and smooth operation of the business that was of greatest concern to Batterjee and his team . “ Our Hospital Information System ( HIS ), and our HYCU backup and disaster solution were running on this legacy infrastructure . With all our patient data and mission-critical applications at stake , we simply could not accept the sub-par backup and recovery performance , that resulted from HYCU being hosted in this environment ,” he said .

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