Background
PAM Group is one of the UK’s largest privately owned Occupational Health, Rehabilitation, Wellbeing and Absence Management company.
Of its 650 employees, 400 are clinical staff who support over 700,000 people across 1,000 clients including NHS Trusts and the Ministry of Justice. The company relies on OHIO, an in-house system in use 24/7/365, which needed to be resilient and made future-proof.
Challenge
PAM Group has grown substantially since it was founded in 2004. Its internally-developed, feature-rich occupational health information management system, OHIO, was hosted on expensive and inflexible infrastructure.
PAM Group’s small IT team was finding it increasingly time consuming to integrate and extend the OHIO system with new technologies. The hosting provider’s disaster recovery capabilities were not keeping up with aspirational Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).
PAM Group decided to move OHIO to the cloud and needed additional expertise to deliver the transformation. The company engaged Insight to plan and manage the migration from on-premise to AWS Cloud and provide a 24/7/365 Managed Service.
“Insight is excellent at listening to what you want to achieve and providing a good sounding board that is agnostic in terms of vendors and technologies they work with. They fulfil the role of a trusted advisor. From inception, to design, planning, testing and now AWS service management, it has been a really good experience.
“Insight’s continued, dedicated support to PAM Group’s cloud transformation journey has resulted in further important recommendations to improve PAM Group’s capability. These recommendations will be implemented in the next financial year.”
Lee Kingshott, Chief Technology Officer
Solution and Outcome
Insight worked closely with PAM Group for nine months to deliver the successful migration. Initially PAM Group was looking to simply move OHIO onto a cloud platform and came to Insight for advice. Insight ran a series of workshops to help PAM Group identify the costs, risks and achievable benefits of a migration that went beyond a ‘lift and shift’ approach.
Insight designed a solution that maximised the functionality of AWS, leading PAM Group to adopt two AWS ‘Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) services. These included the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) and AWS FSx for Windows PaaS Service. This helped to remove the operational cost of managing servers, and increasing resilience, through the use of a multi-site deployment with automated failover – all delivered without the need for any code changes. This simplified PAM Group’s licensing commitments such that Microsoft SQL Server licenses no longer had to be maintained.
Delivery of the migration was meticulously planned by the Insight project lead who created a precise timeline for data migration and process testing. Along with managing the AWS platform, Insight manages PAM Group’s Microsoft Office 365 and Azure platforms 24/7/365.
Migrating the entire system to AWS Cloud unlocked the potential for PAM Group to modernise and transform the infrastructure supporting OHIO and exploit the latest cloud native capabilities. PAM Group’s IT team can now focus on further extending and integrating the OHIO system with newer technologies.
Why Insight?
For PAM Group, Insight provided the right level of expertise, care and diligence to make the project a success.
The group’s CTO had worked with Insight before, but not in a professional services context. He knew Insight’s vendor-agnostic approach would give PAM Group confidence in the migration project.
As a precursor to the migration project, Insight delivered two other projects to provide disaster recovery and create a data lake in AWS. Throughout these projects, Insight helped PAM Group learn about the underlying technology and tool sets for the bigger project.
