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ALCIS, a non-profit organisation dedicated to enhancing global health security, faced a critical challenge: modernising its IT infrastructure to support a fully remote workforce and enable advanced data analytics for disease surveillance and outbreak response. Yobah partnered with ALCIS to design and deliver a cloud-first solution that would future-proof their operations and unlock new capabilities.
The Challenge
ALCIS relied on an on-premises data centre to host their core infrastructure, as well as dedicated workstations that run ESRI for geographic analytics. These workstations are powered by expensive GPUs and required their users to remot on over a VPN. This setup was becoming a bottleneck for the firms growth and flexibility:
Some challenges included:
- Contract renewal pressure: The data centre agreement was expiring, which would require costly contract extensions.
- Limited scalability: Physical hardware constraints, procurement for GPUs and end-of-life equipment restricted growth and flexibility.
- Remote work friction: Provisioning laptops and workstations for a globally distributed team was slow and expensive.
- Innovation gap: On-premises infrastructure blocked access to cloud-native tools such as AI, machine learning and big data analytics.
Without a comprehensive IT modernisation, ALCIS risked increasing inefficiencies and missing key opportunities to adopt secure, innovative technologies. These challenges posed a threat to their mission of advancing global health initiatives through data-driven insight and agile, compliant infrastructure.
How we helped
Yobah proposed a hybrid-to-cloud migration strategy, with Microsoft Azure as the foundation. The solution was designed around three principles:
- Work from anywhere, securely: Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) enabled secure, device-agnostic access for a 100% remote team. No matter where they were in the world.
- Rapid scalability: Cloud resources could flex with project demands, adding users or compute power in minutes.
- Integrated ecosystem: Seamless integration with Microsoft 365 and advanced analytics tools like Azure Databricks, Power BI, and Azure OpenAI.
Building on these principles, we delivered NVIDIA GPU backed Azure Virtual desktop hosts that could be shared across their teams to run ESRI from anywhere in the world. These hosts could quickly scale to support new users should contractors or third parties need to leverage the infrastructure. In one benchmark, ALCIS engineers cut analysis time down to 5 minutes, which was taking over 24 hours to complete on the physical workstations.
To further enable this environment, Yobah provisioned secure, scalable cloud storage integrated with the Azure Virtual Desktop solution. This new storage platform gave ALCIS the ability to harness advanced cloud-native capabilities, such as AI and analytics. This expanded their ability to derive actionable insights to help enhance their global health data initiatives..
The Impact:
- Flexibility: ALCIS can now easily onboard new team members globally without ordering new hardware
- Scalability: Compute resources scale instantly to meet project needs, quickly reducing rendering and analysis time.
- Innovation: Access to the Microsoft platform opens up AI and big data tools that accelerates insights for global health security.
- Cost Control: Predictable monthly spend with long-term savings through reserved instances. Providing clarity and budgeting. Datacentre close-down saved a large capital investment.
- Speed: Cut data analysis time down from over 24 hours to 5 minutes.
- Security: A geographic workforce who often connected from insecure locations had enhanced identity security.
Technologies Delivered
Building out a secure environment that gives ALCIS a flexible platform to scale and grow from a geographically dispersed workforce required the latest technology to build upon. Yobah worked with the team to leverage existing investments in licensing while adding resources from the Azure platform gave ALCIS the tools it needed to deliver the change. The technologies delivered included:
- Conditional Access for Identity Security
- Azure Virtual Desktop powered by NVIDA GPUs
- Azure Firewall
- Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage
- Cloudflare CDN and DNS Protection