Modern workstations – dedicated and blessed to be near to the cloud

The Diakonnissen community replaces its up to 15-year-old, organically grown IT system with a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution.

Project environment

The Kommunität Diakonissenhaus was founded in 1852 and is home to 70 sisters who work with 70 employees on permanent contracts and many volunteers to help people in today’s society. They provide valuable services by tending to others’ spiritual welfare, preaching, conducting social work with children and adolescents, running a home for the elderly and a care home as well as a coffee-house with a small shop and a hotel and offering several practical courses.

Maintaining the feeling of community, being able to exchange information and insight with others and collaborating across the four locations Riehen, Basel, Wildberg and Nevers/Burgundy are particularly important to the sisters. They do not differentiate between private and professional use of their IT.

We continuously adapt our services and focal points to the needs of the individuals in our community. As a consequence, our IT system has grown organically over the past 15 years, becoming increasingly mismatched and inflexible, with costs increasing significantly,”

is how Sister Iris Neu, Head of Construction and Technology, describes the situation in the IT of the Diakonissenhaus.

Project requirements & goals

“The greatest uniformity possible in an appropriately diverse form” – this was the IT vision set out by the community. A new solution was to unify applications and operating systems, reinstate the system’s flexibility and render operating costs foreseeable again.

Implementation & project outcome

redballoon proved to be the ideal hybrid solution in ensuring the applications were uniform and would stand the test of time. Axians redtoo’s all-in-one cloud solution ensures that the major components, such as server services, storage capacity, Exchange Online, the Windows server, OneDrive, endpoint protection, SharePoint, Intune, Office 365 and Outlook are available to all users in the same, most recent version. Not only does this make collaboration significantly easier, it also simplifies the transfer of user knowledge within the community.

redballoon now also facilitates maximum flexibility. The full range of Microsoft cloud platform services is available and can be activated at short notice or deactivated if they are no longer in use. This eliminates the need for a long-term IT strategy, which was an issue in any case, as the sisters require such considerable flexibility. Any investments or risks involved in new IT projects are also eliminated by redballoon. A server remains available on site within the community for any applications that have not yet been migrated to the cloud as well as sensitive data.

In choosing Axians’ redballoon solution, we have consciously opted for an entirely new concept. It provides us with the freedom we wanted to be able to better go about our diverse tasks,”

Sister Iris Neu underscores how happy she is with the successful integration.