Industry – Healthcare 

Challenge –  

The Evercare Group operates as an integrated healthcare delivery platform in emerging markets across Africa and South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya and Nigeria. 

Evercare believes that access to healthcare is a fundamental right. This accounts for the humongous invests in emerging markets to bring private, quality driven healthcare to residents. 

Evercare Group sought equipment/solutions that would be used to achieve state-of-the-art information technology driven healthcare services in Nigeria and other parts of Africa. Some of the benefits Evercare hospital expected to derive from the project included: 

• Personalized patient experiences 
• Enable remote care and collaboration 
• Simplify clinical workflows 
• Optimize workplace efficiencies 
• Facilitate security and compliance 
• Connect R&D and manufacturing 

Selection Criteria- 

Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) desired a Network partner that could assure a network segmentation that supported tailored security and policies by the administrator, a comprehensive threat protection and a flexible interface that met the needs of their network. The NCDC team recognized the following in their criteria list for their WLAN internet connection, LAN infrastructure service, wireless LAN and IP-PBX unified communication: 

Due to the for excellence and quality-driven services, Evercare sought for a Technology partner that could leverage on the best designs in enterprise architecture, best-in-class infrastructure available on the market coupled with specific software needs from leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).  

Layer3’s approach from design to implementation, project management and after-sales support prioritized safety and ease of access as additional features to Evercare’s return on investment.   

On this project, Layer3 functioned as the One-stop shop for the delivery and support of Evercare Hospital’s datacentre infrastructure solutions comprising of networks, security, computing, storage, virtualization, and voice, among others. 

Result- 

The journey towards a technology-driven healthcare facility for Evercare Hospital started with a consultative approach to evaluate Evercare’s current infrastructure and needs. To achieve the delivery of next generation healthcare services in Nigeria, Layer3 deployed the following solutions: 

1. Compute, Storage and Virtualization 

Layer3 designed and implemented an integrated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution with vSphere & vSAN to improve business agility, consequently speeding up operations and lowering costs.  

As a healthcare provider, Evercare Hospital was concerned with uptime, so doctors and critical staff always have access to all the tools. These challenges were well addressed by vSphere & vSAN which utilizes same hardware for compute and storage thereby lowering cost and improving the management of the infrastructure, delivering consistent infrastructure and consistent operations across data centres and public clouds to accelerate application speed and agility for business innovation and growth. Veeam availability suite was used to provide an additional layer of data protection and monitoring ensuring a robust and highly available infrastructure for Evercare’s Hospital applications and services.  

2. Network Infrastructure 

The project involved the implementation of a secure enterprise network solution at the headquarters to ensure an efficient, reliable, fully redundant and secure communication within the hospital’s local network infrastructure. It supports and enhances seamless transmission (replication) of data across the network. 

The network infrastructure supports and enhances connectivity to and from other Evercare hospitals or primary health-centers around the world. This is done to enhance optimum staff productivity, high level of Integrity as well as security and support for high user mobility. 

A combination of Cisco Borderless solution and Data Centre solution was deployed to efficiently and reliably secure various segments of the network. 

The core of the network was built with Cisco 9500 series 10GB switches that were made redundant via cisco stack-wise technology. The access switches across the floors were stacked through the same stack-wise technology and uplinked to the core switches with a 10GB connection. To have a seamless and fast access to the hospital management system application, the compute infrastructure connects to the network through server farm switches that has switching capacity of about 480Gbps. 

The network was segmented by floors as well as voice and data. Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) was used to achieve this segmentation with inter-vlan routing to enable communication within the different networks. 

Cisco Meraki was deployed across floors to connect both the hospital staff and guest via a network segmented by SSIDs in different VLANs. 

3. Security (firewall) 

Fortinet firewall was deployed as both the internal and external firewall in higher availability (HA) mode. The design is a full mesh active/active setup providing full redundancy at all the layers of the network, thus eliminating failures may occur either by device/interface failure or faulty cable.  

Authentication, bandwidth management and web filtering are performed by clustered FortiGate 500E and secured socket locker (SSL/VPN) to enable remote access of staff. 

4. Network, Server, and Application monitoring 

SolarWinds, a World Class IT monitoring and management tool built for system administrator and network engineers who need powerful and affordable tools was deployed. It was deployed and configured to monitor all the HPE Compute Hardware Systems, Network & Security Hardware System, WAF/Load Balancer Hardware System and Required Applications too.  

5. Load balancing/WAF 

The F5 Web Application Firewalls (WAF) deployed for this project was used to protect the hospital applications from data breaches by fixing vulnerabilities and stopping attacks. It provides malicious bot protection, application-layer encryption, API inspection, and behaviour analytics to help defend against application attacks. It was also used to load balance access to and from the compute infrastructure. 

6. Collaboration 

Cisco Unified Communications system (supporting over 1000 users) was deployed for the project. The system consists of a single cluster with publisher and subscribers. 

It is the media-processing engine of Cisco unified Communications, extending telephony features and capabilities to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media-processing devices, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways, and multimedia applications. All other services are made possible through Cisco Unified Communications Open Telephony application programmable interface. 

Cisco Unity Connection was used to transparently integrate messaging and voice-recognition functions to provide continuous global access to calls and messages. It also provides robust Automated-Attendant functions, including intelligent routing for incoming calls and easily customizable call-screening and message-notification options. 

Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM And Presence Service was configured to provide an Instant Messaging and Presence messaging integration platform takes advantage of intelligence in Cisco networks and Cisco Unified Communications Manager to deliver highly secure, reliable, and high-quality communications. 

Finally, Cisco Contact centre express servers were used for call centre services as its houses the IVR, Agents and supervisor services using a top-notch desktop solution called the Cisco Finesse. This allows Evercare hospital call agents manage call by various clients (internal & external) while delivering on their expected customer services.