Wednesday, December 04, 2019

Thank You!

From: Heringer,Mark
Sent: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 4:33 PM
Subject: Thank You!

To: Adventist Health Information Technology Technical Services Enterprise Teams

As I am fond of saying, I am an old dog. I have had the pleasure to experience a wide variety of opportunities, challenges and implementations. Yet, the last year has been somewhat unique.

Just over a year ago, we responded to the Camp Fire and the loss of the Feather River Hospital. We worked to install a number of Feather River’s applications, including the Varian cancer center and retail pharmacy systems, in the enterprise data center. We scrambled to build out temporary call centers in Roseville and Marysville and help reopen several of their clinics.

At the same time, we had a full court press under way to move the data center from Creekside to the new colocation site. The enterprise data center had been in Creekside 1 for more than sixteen years. Stretching into the first quarter of this year, the teams moved over 1,000 physical and virtual servers and about 1.6 petabytes of storage.

In March and April, there was a mad scramble to complete the technical infrastructure for the Roseville building. This culminated in moving more 1,300 people into the new building in five days in late April.

In the midst of all of this change, we updated the key components of our technical authentication systems, including upgrading ADFS, the ADFS proxy servers and the NetScaler and installing the NetScaler Unified Gateway. This was a very large lift; I have affectionally referred to the mishmash of ten year old systems and versions that were previously in place as our “popsicle stick house.” These upgrades paved the way for a much cleaner application authentication process with support for multi-factor authentication.

As we were settling into the new building, the Rideout project went off the rails. To get it back on track, we purchased, configured and installed more than 1,000 workstations and hundreds of printers and other peripherals in about seven weeks in late June, July and early August. To support this effort, IT Senior Leadership spent almost two months living in a cave in Marysville. The market teams stepped up in a big way to help with this project. In particular, Kevin led the effort, while Paul, Jason and the Central Valley team played a critical role in the printer roll out.

Starting to take a breather from the Rideout Project, Adventist Health took the covers off of Project Green in late September. In less than five weeks, we built out the technical infrastructure for a 350 employee office in Kansas City. This included workstations, printers, phones, network infrastructure and call center software.

In the fourth quarter, we also finished up a multi-year effort to install Cisco ISE in all the markets. This represents an enormous amount of work by the enterprise and market teams. This substantially increases Adventist Health’s security profile. It is just first phase of our efforts to leverage this technology.

Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg of all the enterprise and market projects that have taken place in the last year. As Matt has pointed out, we have made a number of rushed projects look easy…

None of this would have been possible without your hard work. Thank you!

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