Westfund: Expanding health insurance coverage with cloud-based solutions

Westfund Health Insurance helped pave the way for private health coverage in Australia in the 1950s. The not-for-profit organization delivers access to the largest private hospital network in the country, providing members with more access, affordability, and choice of healthcare services.

But to differentiate themselves and stay ahead of changing market demands, Westfund needed to expand services and attract new customers — particularly younger members and people in rural areas. This meant improving data access and transitioning away from an onsite data center that struggled to keep up with growth and development.

Westfund needed a storage infrastructure that could support new requests and initiatives, including well-performing websites, online services, mobile apps, and customer support. They entrusted NetApp and partner Canary IT to migrate sensitive data to a cloud-enabled data center.

The upgrade's impact was immediate — the team saw 4x improvement in storage performance, lightning-fast applications, and dramatic employee productivity gains. With NetApp's help, Westfund can deliver better customer experiences, deploy projects with confidence, and cut costs with improved productivity and infrastructure management.

Westfund's cloud journey is just getting started. With their new infrastructure in place, Westfund can improve critical business services and create entirely new offerings that leverage the cloud's on-demand capacity and cost efficiency.

The upgrade and an eventual migration of the data centre from onsite Lithgow to offsite Sydney and to multicloud platforms will also go a long way toward improving the availability and security of corporate systems. Use of the cloud for disaster recovery will help reduce costs, minimize the need for additional IT staff, and make sure that the health insurer can meet all governance, risk, and compliance guidelines.

Their investment is also going to help Westfund with more predicable costs and additional opportunities for predictable savings, such as reducing the need for IT staff to manage different platforms. NetApp ONTAP for storage management in a hybrid environment does it all—on premises, in the cloud, production, development, DR—from a single view.