How cancer support experts CanTeen narrowly escaped a tech breakdown by successfully relocating their IT

There have been 138,281 cancer cases diagnosed in Australia in 2018. But in spite of this rapidly growing number, there is no way to ever fully prepare you when cancer strikes. This is why cancer support groups are a much-needed respite for individuals who find themselves or their family members facing cancer.

CanTeen is a charity group that supports young people dealing with a close family member’s cancer or their own. Through CanTeen, they learn to explore, deal, and come to terms with their feelings about cancer. The support group gives them a safe space to cope with these difficult emotions and helps them connect with others their age in similar situations. CanTeen also offers young cancer patients with access to specialist treatment teams.

At the heart of CanTeen and everything they do are the young people affected by cancer who need support and also offer their very own to others just like them.

CanTeen relies on the generosity of the community to continue its vital work, which also includes leading-edge research into dealing with the emotional and social impacts of cancer and aims to gain a true understanding of young people’s behaviour when cancer does happen to them.

The Business Need

To better cater to the needs of their community, CanTeen has endeavored to relocate their Sydney CBD office to Newtown. This involves cutting over to a new wide area network (WAN) and relocating their IT infrastructure to a new data centre.

Key Challenges

Fully relocating your IT infrastructure and implementing network changes and reconfigurations can be a daunting prospect, especially if you only have one system administrator as your only resource. To make it even more challenging, logistically, the IT infrastructure move and switch over had to be completed overnight as CanTeen had no backup equipment in place.

Solution

Vlad Semenikhin, CanTeen’s Systems Administrator, issued a select tender to three companies who were chosen from recommendations by CanTeen’s Citrix account manager.

Based on the responses to the tender and the presentations which were provided, Lanrex won the business to facilitate the move.

Vlad and CanTeen’s management team were both impressed with the level of professionalism and can-do spirit shown by Lanrex and it’s team towards their specific requirements. After the decision was made, Lanrex won the bid as the “suitable candidate.”

For its part, Lanrex conducted a complete risk analysis prior to the commencement of the CanTeen’s IT system migration. All essential risk mitigation was clearly and thoroughly documented. Documentation was also provided outlining Lanrex’s approach to the project.

The move was scheduled for a Friday evening with the aim of having all systems available for the Monday morning return to work.

The pack-up commenced at 6:00 pm, the move began at 9:30 pm, and all systems were successfully back online at 2:00 am on Saturday morning, without any untoward issues.

The Results

Through Lanrex’s experienced team of professionals, CanTeen’s IT system and infrastructure was successfully installed and migrated to their new office without any significant disruption to the business.

The Future

CanTeen continues to work with Lanrex on a number of projects including the upgrade of their Citrix environment from XenApp 5.0 to 7.6. This is a type of upgrade and overhaul of their IT environment which includes a brand new build.

Since CanTeen’s current IT environment was still using outdated 32-bit architecture and a Windows 2008 server, the change was long overdue.

CanTeen’s new hardware in the data centre with increased storage now provides greater efficiency and productivity.

Future projects include updating the CanTeen CRM, a move to Office 365, and changing from tape backup to backup to disk.

As CanTeen’s system administrator noted, working with Lanrex has given CanTeen a fresh start and has enabled them to continue reaching out to others who need the help of their support group.

Along with the smooth and timely relocation, Vlad was impressed with the way Lanrex performed saying,

“They were very good throughout the move. They are very willing to assist and they are always upfront and straightforward in their approach.”

To Vlad, working with Lanrex has been an overall smooth and positive experience and one that he would recommend to anyone else who may need the same level of support to empower their business to scale.