Now that more and more healthcare professionals are using that environment to work (together), the importance of a safety net to prevent file loss is growing. The long-term collaboration with IT provider KEMBIT makes it a no-brainer to ask this trusted partner for this. The choice fell on Back-IT 365 from cloud provider Uniserver, also an old acquaintance of De Zorggroep.

Uniserver has been providing cloud services to KEMBIT and De Zorggroep for years. KEMBIT specializes in the healthcare sector and is one of Uniserver's oldest partners. “We provide a solid cloud foundation, so that KEMBIT can purchase this technology as a service without having to make any investments. This way, KEMBIT can fully focus on the customer,” says Twan Sinnige, Product Manager at Uniserver.

KEMBIT emphasizes that unburdening (care) customers is of paramount importance Lourens Stallion, Service Manager at KEMBIT. “De Zorggroep was one of our first major healthcare customers. We have gradually expanded this relationship with more services in areas such as the working environment.”

There was already growing digitalization in the healthcare sector prior to the corona pandemic. But healthcare is a sector par excellence that focuses on the human aspect of work: care for patients and clients. Especially because many healthcare workers do not have the time to increase their digital skills. However, clear steps have been taken in the use of digital tools, especially such as MS Teams.

However, De Zorggroep as an organization has invested a lot in IT in recent years to support digital instruments, Lourens Hengst emphasizes. For example, the organization has an IT support service, which is very capable in infrastructure, the management of IT services, mobile services, applications and workplaces. “They offer healthcare workers a lot of support in using Microsoft applications, for example, through a first-line helpdesk. In that respect, we have noticed that De Zorggroep is quite ahead of the curve compared to many other healthcare providers.”

The demand for a reliable backup service arose from the growing use of Microsoft workplace applications, including Exchange and Teams. There is a rapidly growing flow of data circulating there. Microsoft itself offers a retention period within the Exchange environment, but this is limited to 90 days. And if there is an incident that causes data to be lost, for example due to an accident, a hack or a malicious employee, Microsoft does not guarantee that that data can be retrieved.

“The healthcare sector must of course comply with legal requirements when it comes to data retention,” says Lourens Hengst. “A retention period of 90 days does not meet this requirement. In addition, it may take longer than 90 days for an employee to discover that something he or she deleted or lost should have been kept.”

In short, De Zorggroep wanted the certainty that deleted or lost data, such as reports or emails, could still be retrieved after 90 days. Back-IT 365 offers that option. Uniserver's core business is the provision of cloud-based infrastructure that customers use themselves. But Back-IT 365 goes one step further.

“This is our Veeam-based backup environment for Microsoft 365, which we provide as a SaaS service,” says Twan Sinnige. “It includes backup for Exchange, email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. We supply and manage the environment, but also the software, such as patches and updates. The customer only has to worry about the user of the service.”

The service is now used by Uniserver partners at more than 1.000 organizations. These service providers and their end customers can easily use the service via a multi-tennant self-service portal. Service providers can monitor and support their customers separately, while the end customer only sees his own environment via the portal.

Back-IT 365 creates a copy of the Microsoft 365 work environment. If a document is lost, in most cases it can be quickly found and restored. The purpose of the SaaS service is to keep the time to restore something as short as possible: the recovery-time objective. Because the Back-IT 365 portal is available to the end customer, the recovery time can often be limited to about ten minutes.

“We have offered two other backup options,” says Lourens Hengst. “The Zorggroep ultimately chose Back-IT 365 for two reasons. First of all, because it is both versatile and easy to use. Secondly, because Uniserver is the supplier of this service and De Zorggroep has a long relationship with us directly and with Uniserver. This gave them the confidence that they were choosing the best service with the best support. We are now the first point of contact for all services provided by Uniserver for De Zorggroep.”

KEMBIT provides the service to De Zorggroep and can pay per user per month. “The service has so far been running autonomously, without many problems,” notes Sinnige. “If something needs to be restored, this can be done down to file level. It is extremely easy: if one user has lost something, it can usually be found. A contract, an agreement or other important document. KEMBIT's IT people can search for a file via a self-service portal. That is also the most common way in which the service is used.”

“Back IT 365 has been running for almost two years now. At that time, we could count on one hand the number of requests for a restore of lost data,” Lourens Hengst emphasizes. “You should mainly view Back-IT as an insurance policy: hope that you don't need it or need it as little as possible, but know that you have good coverage if that happens.”

Johan Schreurs of De Zorggroep underlines the words of Lourens Hengst. “We at De Zorggroep are happy to have chosen the Back-IT 365 solution from Uniserver and KEMBIT. This means we are not dependent on the much more limited retention times from the standard Microsoft 365 environment. We have already been able to use a Back-IT 365 restore several times, which could be carried out correctly and quickly by our IT service provider.”

The Care Group is the largest healthcare provider in North and Central Limburg. With home care and residential and care centers, the organization offers support, care and treatment to the elderly and vulnerable citizens.

KEMBIT offers the healthcare sector solutions in the field of data security, efficiency, digitizing processes and even develops entire workplace concepts that fit well with the current situation within healthcare organizations and often use common technologies that can be developed, personalized and implemented with relatively little impact are.