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.
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:
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.
Yobah proposed a hybrid-to-cloud migration strategy, with Microsoft Azure as the foundation. The solution was designed around three principles:
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:
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: