Spadafy leverages eG Enterprise to deliver secure VDI and professional services to healthcare providers

At a Glance

Background

Spadafy is a leading specialist in healthcare IT, applications and VDI across the USA. Originally Spadafy offered professional consultancy services to implement, troubleshoot or optimize IT systems for hospitals and healthcare groups. Spadafy has since expanded to become an MSP (Managed Service Provider) offering a secure and reliable fully managed VDI service. The company has also expanded into sectors beyond healthcare where commercial customers have similar mission-critical needs to their healthcare base.

Spadafy offers a fully managed VDI service to hospitals and healthcare groups. Customers range in size from small 25 bed hospitals to multi-site systems supporting multiple hospitals and clinics with 10000+ users. Common applications used include: EMR systems such as Epic and Cerner, Microsoft 365, as well as specialist radiology and PACS apps. Applications are virtualized or offered through virtual desktops for access by in-house hospital IT teams, rather than Spadafy engineers.

Spadafy also provides professional consultancy services to optimize, right-size and troubleshoot in-house healthcare IT systems, leveraging eG Enterprise on short-term projects basis to analyze existing Citrix, VMware, networking and on-prem infrastructures.

Spadafy's Challenges

• Prove it's not VDI: Spadafy's MSP IT team needed comprehensive end-to-end monitoring to augment their VDI service. Often, they had to provide evidence to demonstrate that the problems were caused by the applications and databases supported by hospital IT teams and not in their VDI service.
• The MSP team must be proactive: Since the systems they support are critical to patient safety, they have to detect and resolve issues before they impact the healthcare providers. Timely and accurate alerting of problems are key to ensure 24/7 service continuity.
• Demonstrate service effectiveness: The ability to measure and report on service performance monthly was another key customer requirement.
• Maximize staff efficiency: The IT team is highly specialized and skilled and must have automation tools to ensure that they focus on high-value tasks.

Why eG Enterprise?

• Spadafy had previously evaluated and used multiple monitoring solutions but had seen gaps in end-to-end observability. Most solutions lacked the ability to automate the in-depth analysis that Spadafy needed and the reports that customers demanded.
• Spadafy found that only eG Enterprise had the out-of-the-box alerting they needed plus sufficient reporting capabilities. Furthermore, eG Enterprise was significantly more cost-effective and easier to deploy than other alternatives.
• eG Enterprise's pay-as-you-use licensing suits both Spadafy's MSP service and their short-term consultancy projects.

Implementation

The Spadafy branded eG Enterprise console

eG Enterprise is deployed in Microsoft Azure and configured to provide end-to-end monitoring of Spadafy's managed VDI services. eG Enterprise's out-of-the-box metric thresholds, AIOps-powered root-cause problem diagnosis and alerts ensure that if a problem occurs anywhere in the VDI landscape, the IT team is immediately notified.

In addition to the ready-to-go reports, Spadafy has also leveraged custom dashboards and reports. These dashboards and reports highlight KPIs including VDI latencies, desktop availability, resource usage, application performance, user logon times, usage data and more.

On consultancy projects, the auto-discovery and deployment features allow eG Enterprise to be rapidly used to provide initial data, analysis and customer-ready reports. Spadafy experts can then target their specialist knowledge to identify the highest value and most effective improvement options for customers.

Results

Spadafy has seen many benefits from deploying eG Enterprise in healthcare VDI environments.

Benefits to the Spadafy IT team:

• The team now has a comprehensive unified monitoring solution for healthcare systems and applications - eliminating previous blind spots.
• The Spadafy IT team gets instant alerts when desktop utilization is high and are able to intervene before healthcare professionals are affected.
• The additional insights they now have beyond Citrix and VMware built-in tools are invaluable for diagnosis. They can prove when incidents are due to customer application issues and not with the VDI service.
• Since eG Enterprise can monitor technologies beyond VDI, the Spadafy team is able to diagnose application performance issues caused by database problems and networking, thereby value-adding to their customers.

Benefits for customers:

• Customer IT teams now have access to detailed data-based reports and incident analysis. This ensures confidence and collaboration without finger-pointing or unnecessary to-and-fro among the IT teams and their service providers.
• eG Enterprise's flexible MSP-friendly licensing allows Spadafy to rapidly support new clinics and hospitals on-demand and take on urgent troubleshooting projects quickly. Healthcare providers can now rapidly respond to needs and challenges and continually optimize costs.

Benefits to the company:

• Spadafy's specialized healthcare services have been a hit and they have seen significant revenue growth since deploying eG Enterprise. Automation of customer reports has allowed them to scale with demand.
• Spadafy is rapidly increasing their market share of healthcare VDI. As they grow, they may consider moving the management platform on-premises to make the service more cost-effective and to guard against Azure price increases. eG Enterprise provides them this flexibility.

About eG Innovations

eG Innovations is dedicated to helping businesses across the globe transform IT service delivery into a competitive advantage and a center for productivity, growth, and profit. Many of the world's largest businesses, across different verticals, use eG Enterprise technology to enhance IT service performance, increase operational efficiency, ensure IT effectiveness.