"In the past, when we still used Citrix, we got a lot of calls about login and printing problems. Now that we've made the switch to Parallels Secure Workspace, those calls have strongly declined, which significantly lowered the workload for the IT department."
Servicedesk Engineer, Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg
The Hospital of East-Limburg (Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg or ZOL) is one of the largest peripheral hospitals in the province of Limburg and employs around 3000 people in staff and is home to over 300 medical doctors.
Because the hospital is spread across three campuses (a number which will continue to grow as ZOL has recently merged with another hospital, Ziekenhuis Maas en Kempen), they noticed an increasing need to enable mobile work from anywhere, on any device.
ZOL is continuously working on its digital transformation. In line with that is the expectation of its employees to be able to access their data — patient files, hospital-specific applications, and more —from anywhere and via any device (both managed and unmanaged).
The challenge
In the past, they had a Citrix environment up and running but they were displeased about its level of stability, its complexity, and the fact that users were only able to access their data by installing an agent to establish the connection – a rather cumbersome predicament.
"It was absolutely crucial for us to have a new, modern and stable environment that we could deploy in a qualitative way and that allowed us to tackle as many use cases as possible."
CIO, Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg
“We chose Parallels Secure Workspace because it allows us to, in an easy way, give our users access to our internal systems,” says Kurt Gielen (ICT Operations Manager, ZOL). “And it does that without the need for agents or clients, without the hassle of complicated systems that require a lot of updates and maintenance.”
With Parallels Secure Workspace, ZOL gives its users the option to simply log in to their workspace via a web browser to start using all of their applications — be it legacy, SaaS or web. “An important driver to choose for Parallels Secure Workspace was the cost aspect,” says Kurt.
After comparing Citrix with Parallels Secure Workspace, they noticed a cost decrease of 50% – both in terms of licensing and operational costs. The latter became very apparent when talking to the IT support team at ZOL.
That cost decrease is also noticeable when it comes to operational excellence.
"One of the advantages that we’ve seen when switching to Parallels Secure Workspace is that we were also able to shrink our server farm. In the past, we needed 20 servers to keep our Citrix environment running. When migrating to Parallels Secure Workspace we were able to reduce that number to eight – or even less!"
ICT Operations Manager
The solution
Initially, the idea of implementing Parallels Secure Workspace was to enable their staff and doctors to work from anywhere. To do that, they needed a solution that was as least intrusive as possible — and Parallels Secure Workspace ticked that box.
"It's an easy-to-use product. You don't need to install or update agents or clients; you effortlessly log in to the workspace to access our internal systems via a web portal which is a big plus for our users in the day-to-day maintenance and use of our systems."
ICT Operations Manager
Parallels Secure Workspace also helped ZOL in light of their JCI accreditation, which is an industry-wide standard for care quality.
In terms of IT, being JCI-accredited implies that you can deliver excellent care to your patients at any possible time —even in times of a major power outage or another type of disaster.
According to Kurt, many hospitals print out every single patient file daily and construct an overwhelming paper archive to be “IT-independent”. However, ZOL found a much more cost-efficient and definitely easier way to accomplish this.
"We used the same technology in an Azure setup to give access to our emergency systems, completely isolated from our on-premises environment and live-replicated in the cloud, always accessible in case of emergency."
ICT Operations Manager
The result
Initially, ZOL started with setting up Parallels Secure Workspace on their on-premises systems. “The goal of that was to offer our employees and doctors easy access to our medical records software, Chipsoft HIX, and to our most important line of business applications.”, said Gielen. After that, the Parallels Secure Workspace-as-DRS-project rolled out, where the Parallels Secure Workspace technology was used to give access to the emergency systems which are kept in sync on Azure and that sit completely isolated from the on-premises environment.
“After those two initial phases, we started actively migrating Citrix users to the Parallels Secure Workspace platform”, Kurt says. Right now, everyone at ZOL works in a consolidated way on the Parallels Secure Workspace platform when performing external services.
"Now that everyone works with Parallels Secure Workspace, Citrix has been completely replaced and taken offline."
ICT Operations Manager
