Royal Australasian College of Surgeons partners with Champions of Change on cloud transformation

The century-old institution was facing rising virtualisation costs.

The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) has partnered with Champions of Change on its cloud transformation, saving $2.1 million over five years and up to 21,000 kWh’s of power annually.

The RACS opted for HPE Private Cloud managed through the GreenLake cloud platform to improve performance and reduce its hardware footprint, core count and licensing costs.

Xara Tran, founder and CEO, Champions of Change, said the project was more than simply migrating infrastructure. “It was … modernising the underlying environment without disrupting the critical services that RACS and its members rely on,” she said.

Tackling aging infrastructure and rising costs

When changes to its virtualisation licensing were set to rise by around 300 percent, with a three-year upfront payment, RACS went looking for alternatives. For the not-for-profit organisation, whose mission is to support surgeons into fellowships across the region, savings can be directed to supporting members.

RACS is a century-old institution with a complex technology estate, including legacy applications supporting surgical training, accreditation and regulatory obligations. Champions of Change needed to first understand the dependencies and ensure continuity.

Champions of Change worked closely with RACS and HPE to manage communication, governance and user acceptance testing (UAT) throughout the project.

“We were modernising the infrastructure supporting their applications, rather than fundamentally changing how users interacted with those services,” said Tran.

RACS selected GreenLake for its platform maturity, scalability, cost efficiency, cloud-like management and HPE support.

The new HPE PC3000 environment combines HPE Alletra storage MP B10000, HPE ProLiant compute DL360 Gen12 servers and HPE switches. Deduplication delivered 2:1 data reduction, bringing the storage volume down from 70 TB to approximately 35 TB.

RACS also retired redundant development environments, reducing the number of systems its team must patch, maintain and secure. Its broader roadmap includes disaster recovery optimisation and more cost-effective cloud storage tiers, with the potential to reduce ongoing hosting and infrastructure costs and contribute further savings.

Foundation for future digital adoption

The new HPE GreenLake environment provides RACS with an on-premises infrastructure model that incorporates cloud-like consumption economics. This allows the organisation to align infrastructure capacity more closely with demand, rather than continually investing in capacity well ahead of when it is required.

“While cost optimisation was an important catalyst, the broader objective was to create a more flexible, scalable and commercially sustainable infrastructure environment for RACS,” she said.

HPE Private Cloud also supports systems that record surgical training activity and information required for the college’s audit and accreditation responsibilities.

Continuity is essential for RACS’s high-stakes surgical examinations, with examination systems monitored in real time during exam periods. The migration, facilitated by HPE Services and Champions of Change, was completed without disruption for members

RACS manages significant volumes of information across its regulatory, accreditation, training and research functions. Looking ahead, RACS will utilise the HPE environment as the foundation for future digital services and potentially AI.

“As its data strategy matures, the opportunity is to make that information more accessible, consistent and useful across the organisation,” said Tran.