Médecins Sans Frontières transforms its IT model
ELCA Cloud Services supports Médecins sans Frontières with its objective to improve operational effectiveness, increase flexibility, secure the scalability of its services, and reduce costs through standardization, operational excellence, and innovative technologies.
Project scope and figure
MSF Case Study
Our goals
The primary goal was to transform its original IT Operation Management model into a Service Management model. MSF was looking for a single partner able to assume full ownership of its managed infrastructure services and the administration of its applications.
The IT services had to be flexible, scalable, optimized, standardized, and secured to support the specific operational needs of an international organization like MSF.
MSF’s IT challenges
The IT challenges of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) focus on establishing a robust, highly available, and secure infrastructure capable of meeting extensive resilience and scalability requirements. It is essential to consider the specificities of providing medical and operational services to field teams, often deployed in complex and challenging environments.
MSF must also ensure and secure extended global remote work capacity through centralized IT operations management. The migration of workloads and local data to the Cloud within tight deadlines requires a prior assessment of existing infrastructures and services.
ELCA’s solution
ELCA’s solution involves a comprehensive approach to modernizing IT infrastructure, starting with a prior assessment of existing legacy and on-premise systems. It includes the design and setup of a highly resilient multi-cloud environment, ensuring seamless integration with private and on-premise infrastructures.
The solution also covers the planning and migration of workloads and data to the Cloud, while optimizing cloud services for cost, security, performance, and resilience. Monitoring systems are established for applications, and pre- and post-migration performance is measured to ensure improvements.
Key benefits
MSF now relies on a trusted provider for its IT operations, allowing its HQ resources to focus on coordinating field activities. The global infrastructure's security and resiliency have been enhanced and are now future-proof. All services have been standardized and are monitored to meet MSF's specific operational requirements.
This strategic project was not only a technical project but also an organizational project and a human journey. The change of IT model (from operation management to service management) required a reset of some mindsets at all levels and presented a great opportunity for the MSF team, thanks to the ELCA team. Together, we learned and defined this new way of working, sharing knowledge, and fostering a spirit of continuous improvement. The preparation time for the migration and the stabilization period should not be underestimated, but several months after this migration, I can now say that this transformation is a success.
Philippe Gras
Director of Information Systems for Médecins Sans Frontières Switzerland
Discover more about the Médecins Sans Frontières case study
Whitepaper
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was founded in 1971 in Paris by a group of journalists and doctors. Today, MSF is a global movement with over 67,000 people.