CASE STUDY
Wellbeing Centre members logged on to book their classes . But during lockdown , the site saw spikes when the government issued new guidance on gym closures and subsequent re-openings .
“ If you ’ ve ever tried to book a gym class and the website crashes , you ’ ll know how frustrating it can be ,” said Ankers . “ Difficulty booking classes is likely in the top five things gym-goers most regularly complain about – and a significant factor for members in their decisions to remain with the charity . We simply had to get that fixed .”
By contrast , now that Nuffield Health ’ s website runs in a Node4-supported Azure environment , resources can be scaled up or down in line with demand – and without needing to allocate IT budget to over-provisioned resources . Today , the website has flexible , scalable cloud-based resources supporting it and helping it power through peak-time demand . storage compute vs the cost of the current Azure storage-based compute . To my mind , that means the migration has already paid for itself .
“ We ’ ve also saved around 50 % on support bills . Our legacy environment was incredibly complex . It needed highly specialist – and therefore costly – support . Today , Node4 provides us with a single website and infrastructure support contract , which makes life so much easier for us .”
Confidence to launch new services
Today , Nuffield Health ’ s Azure infrastructure supports class booking and online joining capabilities across its network of Health Fitness & Wellbeing Centres . It also provides the springboard to launch new projects and services – the most recent being Nuffield Health 24 / 7 , a free digital fitness platform for club members .
Avoided costs and cost savings
“ Node4 ’ s cloud-first deployment strategy meant we avoided a hardware refresh that had the potential to hit the £ 500,000 mark ,” said Ankers . “ And we ’ d have required additional funding too – as the nature of fixed infrastructure services would have required a multiyear , locked-in contract .
“ We ’ ve been able to reduce our storage costs by 50 % year-on-year . That ’ s based on the cost of our previous
Teachers can also use the website to access a free Schools Wellbeing programme , which makes content available to encourage and support pupil well-being .
“ Node4 has a real DevOps approach to the work it has done for us . It really ‘ gets ’ how a developer wants to work with Azure and do everything to facilitate that . Node4 has set up the infrastructure so that our developers can capitalise on the resources within Azure . This will be an incredible help in enabling us to launch new services further down the line .
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