Improving the health of IT operations to deliver exceptional membership services

The Norwegian Medical Association (NMA) is a professional association and trade union for physicians in Norway. Employing approximately 180 people, NMA works to protect the professional, social, and financial interests of its 37,000 members.

The NMA strives for high professional, scientific, and academic standards in medical education, at university and beyond. The NMA also takes an active part in the development of the healthcare system in Norway and is a trusted advisor to the Ministry of Health and Care Services.

The NMA serves members at every stage of their careers, from medical school to the workplace all the way through to retirement. It organizes professional and social events, helps members access legal assistance, offers training courses, supports applications for educational grants and scholarships, and more.

To deliver its services, the NMA relies on a wide variety of business applications, such as its mission-critical customer relationship management (CRM) system, running reliably. For this, the underlying infrastructure must be stable, deliver high performance, and simple to maintain.

In recent years, the NMA moved from a traditional storage area network (SAN) to a software-defined storage solution. However, the Dell hardware underpinning the Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) solution did not meet the team’s expectations in terms of performance or stability—a potential risk to overall service quality for members.

The NMA deployed four Azure Stack HCI clusters at its primary data center, configured as a single hybrid cloud platform. The organization uses Veeam Backup & Replication to perform regular backups to an additional Azure Stack HCI cluster hosted at a secondary location. 

Based on twoday best practice, the NMA built a new fabric infrastructure using Azure Stack switches, isolating the core production Azure Stack HCI platform for higher security.

Management of Azure stack HCI is done via Azure cloud.