Care in the Cloud: How a Christchurch-based CMS Provider Offers Security and Protection to the Health and Disability Sector
Filling a need for organisation, efficiency, and security
Health and Disability Support Providers offer crucial services to those with special requirements. But who helps take care of the carers? That’s where Webcare steps in.
Established in Christchurch in 2007, Webcare offers easy-to-use, reliable, and secure client and staff management systems for support providers in the health and disabilities sector. “Our clients provide services to people with disabilities and help them with their day to day needs,” says Sean Renner, CEO & Co-founder of Webcare. “They rely on our software for everything from daily notes, incidents reporting, rostering, scheduling, staffing, client data, facility management, and much more.”
Within the sector, there are many different stakeholders each provider has to liaise with, along with different contracts and different criteria for funding. With so much data and so many variations and standards to keep track of, Webcare’s mission is to make it easy for their customers. “It’s about making it work for the client,” says Sean. “All of these external factors determine what our client is dealing with, and it’s our job to help them manage everything.”
A safe, secure solution
So how does Webcare offer solutions to securely handle such large quantities of sensitive data? “Very early on, we decided we needed our entire development architecture to be cloud-based," says Mayank Keshariya, PhD in mobile networks & security*,* Webcare CTO & Co-founder. “We started Webcare even before iPhones were out, so we put all our eggs into the cloud basket from the start. We knew cloud was where we needed to go, but first we needed to find the right service provider to partner with who could supply us with capable data solutions.”
Webcare’s Sean Renner (L), CEO & Co-Founder and Mayank Keshariya (R), CTO & Co-founder
Extensive research led Sean and Mayank to Voyager. “We first had conversations with Voyager back in 2007,” says Sean. “After doing our due diligence, we had very quickly written off US-based providers,” adds Mayank. “We needed to keep all of our data within New Zealand to meet the data privacy policies.”
“Before we met with Voyager, we’d been going through another provider in Christchurch,” recalls Sean. “But after speaking with Voyager, we knew our data was going to be better managed and more secure with them, as well as offer us the scalability and cloud infrastructure we needed.”
Voyager worked with Sean and Mayank to deliver high performance, enterprise-grade VMware cloud servers to host and store all Webcare’s data. Voyager’s 99.98% uptime SLA guarantee provides Webcare the reliability and security needed to serve their customers.
“Data is our lifeline,” says Mayank. “If that goes down, everything goes down. Based on Voyager’s SLA, we can sign an SLA with our own clients promising a certain level of uptime. Those things are quite critical.”
Additionally, Voyager manages an off-site backup of all Webcare’s data ensuring that it remains secure and protected. “It’s a disaster guarantee,” says Mayank. “If something catastrophic happens, we can bring all our clients’ data back without any problems. After the recent cyber-attacks on the health & financial sectors in NZ, we sent a newsletter to all our clients reassuring them that their own data was safe and pointed to details from the Voyager website on how it’s protected.”
As for accessing all this data, the internet plays a crucial role. “We need the internet to be fast and reliable because we work in the cloud so much,” says Sean. For this, Webcare chose a Voyager business broadband plan to provide the required speed and reliability.
A partnership for the future
The future holds big things for Webcare, as they continue to achieve success and expand their client base. “We’ve seen great growth since our foundation,” says Sean. “Webcare helps clients throughout New Zealand, and about six years ago we further expanded into the Australian health and disabilities sector. We’re now serving clients statewide in Australia with continued growth in NSW, NT and WA. We continue to manage everything from our headquarters in Christchurch, so the ability provided by Voyager to work remotely is the key especially during COVID-19 times.”
Not only that, but Voyager’s solutions have allowed Webcare to scale up as their growth continues. “The flexibility we’ve experienced with Voyager has enabled us to easily scale up,” says Mayank. “Voyager provides us with a development and test environment so we can actually test new software within that environment, which is critical as it needs to be guaranteed to work properly when it goes to our clients.”
It’s not just great solutions that keep Webcare with Voyager.
“It’s our relationships with the people at Voyager that have built our trust in their service and support,” says Sean. “We know we’re going to get the help we need. We have that faith that we can always go back to Voyager and tell them what we need, have a discussion around what we’re looking for - and then they come back with a solution. We trust the advice from Voyager, and we trust the services.”
From a technical side, Mayank sees huge value in the services and security Voyager offers. “My concern is keeping our data safe and having backup plans. Voyager has enough Plan B’s and a great disaster recovery plan, so I trust them. My other big concern is the move towards the future: things change so quickly with new technologies. Voyager keeps up with the new technology and helps us to be futureproof.”