Help At Home Inc. provides in-home care and respite services to elderly, medically fragile and disabled individuals. In business for more than 30 years, the company employs a large staff of trained personal care aides, respite care givers, nursing assistants and registered nurses who provide 24/7 in-home care.
With more than 100 U.S. offices, Help at Home’s operational footprint includes Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina. The company has notable contracts with the Illinois Department on Aging and other state, regional and municipal agencies involved in custodial home care services.
Help at Home’s IT organization is relatively small, but responsible for corporate operations and 103 branch offices. In addition to provisioning, help desk and other support services, they manage an internally developed application for client management and billing that’s used by hundreds of employees across the nation. This mission critical application ensures patients receive the care they need, company revenues are accurately tracked and Help at Home meets the regulatory requirement of overlapping government agencies.
Challenge:
Like most companies, the IT organization at Help at Home is asked to provide increased services to the business while at the same time reducing IT expenditures. “Increasing internal software development with our staff of .NET developers caused us to need more and more servers,” explained Eric Heidrich, Help at Home’s senior manager of IT. But Heidrich knew adding server after server to its data center would increase electricity bills, create excess heat, require more space and increase the burden of IT management.
Help at Home began to investigate virtualization as a method of making IT more responsive to business needs. This included more efficiently providing business services and ensuring high availability, as well as lowering IT costs, streamlining IT management and becoming more energy efficient.
“Instead of purchasing a bunch of hardware,” said Heidrich, “we decided to virtualize, which also helped us to stay ‘green.’” Even with server virtualization as a proven method for achieving many of their goals, Heidrich knew running a mission-critical application in one data center was an invitation to unplanned downtime.
Downtime costs more than money; it can cost customers. In the case of Help at Home, IT downtime could interfere with the delivery of health care to its clients. Heidrich and his team recognized the “IT insecurity” of a mission-critical application running only on in-house servers and vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters. The company wanted a business continuity solution that provided redundancy, recovery and reliability.
Real IT security is about having the redundancy and reliability needed for robust business continuity. For Help at Home, that means redundancy in both infrastructure and data protection for critical files and business services. Their continuity plan needed to be able to restore operations in minutes or hours — not days. And it needed to be simple to mange for Heidrich and his busy team.
