Elly Yates-Roberts |
Leukaemia Foundation, based in Brisbane, Australia, has completed the first phase of its digitalisation project to empower its team of 180 people to deliver better support for people living with blood cancer.
Harnessing intelligent digital platforms, Leukaemia Foundation has deployed Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Yammer to streamline access to data, and improve employee accuracy and timeliness. It has also rolled out Microsoft 365 Defender for additional security.
This programme has taken six months to complete, rather than the predicted 12-18 months, where three out of four of the organisation’s applications have now been modernised and the majority is hosted in the cloud.
“With Microsoft SharePoint and Teams rolled out we have been able to collaborate on the same documents at the same time in the one space and with Teams, staff could communicate via video and work through what they needed to do live,” said Rod Broadhurst, head of ICT at Leukaemia Foundation. “The time and effort saved alone was worth every cent. We were utilising outdated infrastructure that was costly and due to the replication of data in each state – emails of documents being sent from state to state and replicating on each state-based server – the growing cost to maintain these was becoming troublesome.”
Broadhurst favours a hybrid approach for the organisation’s workload, which is available through Azure Active Directory and Azure Sentinel.
“With the use of Intune and Defender we felt comfortable in staff taking home their work computer and laptop and being able to safely work from their home environment,” said Broadhurst. “We took an attitude of ‘work from anywhere, anytime’ in 2019 and with the help of Microsoft 365 services and support we were able to have ourselves in a position that was well ahead of other businesses, and especially not for profits during the pandemic.
“The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting change in the needs of people living with blood cancer propelled the development of online support groups launched in April 2020 and, with the staff already being skilled in the use of Microsoft 365 products, this allowed for the quick pivot of support services including introducing individual and group support sessions via Microsoft Teams.”
Leukaemia Foundation is now looking to consolidate data from different systems through Azure. This will enable the organisation to monitor the quality of life of patients with certain blood cancers and gain a better understanding of blood cancer survivorship, allowing it to develop post-treatment wellness plans.