Orthopaedics SA

The practice

Orthopaedics SA is South Australia's largest orthopaedic practice, with 23 specialist surgeons covering hip, knee, shoulder, spine, hand, foot, paediatric and oncological orthopaedics. The practice operates clinics at five hospital sites across Adelaide — Memorial Hospital in North Adelaide, Ashford Hospital, Flinders Private Hospital, North East Community Hospital in Campbelltown, and Calvary Central Districts Hospital in Elizabeth.

With surgeons consulting, operating and reviewing patients across all five locations, the practice depends on reliable, fast access to centralised clinical and administrative systems from every site, every day.

The problem

Orthopaedics SA's infrastructure had two critical weaknesses: a network that couldn't keep up, and a server room that was a single point of failure for the entire organisation.

The network

All five sites were connected via a Vocus MPLS network delivering approximately 100 Mbps per site. When the network was first deployed, 100 Mbps was adequate. But as clinical systems grew more demanding — larger imaging files, cloud-based applications, increasing reliance on digital workflows — the MPLS links became a bottleneck. Performance was sluggish during peak consulting hours, and the cost of the MPLS service was difficult to justify against what it delivered.

Vocus also didn't offer data centre services directly in South Australia, which meant the network and hosting problems had to be solved with separate providers — adding complexity and cost.

The server room

All of the practice's core systems — practice management, clinical records, billing, file storage, Active Directory — were hosted on servers in the head office at Memorial Hospital. Every other site depended on that single room to function. If the servers, the power, or the network connection at Memorial went down, the entire practice went offline — not just that one clinic, but all five locations.

And it wasn't a theoretical risk. The practice had experienced several outages caused primarily by power problems at the Memorial Hospital site. The existing UPS provided only a short window of protection — enough to survive a brief flicker, but not a sustained outage. When power was lost for longer, servers shut down ungracefully and every clinic across Adelaide lost access to their systems until the head office was restored.

For a medical practice where surgeons are consulting with patients, reviewing imaging, and coordinating surgical schedules across five hospitals, even a short outage is a serious disruption.

What we did

Migrated all infrastructure to the data centre

The first and most important change was moving everything out of the Memorial Hospital server room. All servers were migrated into Caznet's Adelaide data centre, which provides enterprise-grade power redundancy (dual feeds, generators, UPS), physical security, environmental controls and 24/7 monitoring.

The Memorial Hospital office is still the practice's head office and busiest clinic — but it's no longer the single point of failure. If Memorial experiences a power outage, the other four sites continue operating normally because the systems they depend on are in the data centre, not in a room at Memorial.

The data centre environment was provisioned with dual fibre connections and a 1 Gbps internet service to ensure high availability for all inbound site connections and cloud services.

1 Gbps fibre to four hospital sites

The Vocus MPLS network was replaced entirely. Four sites — Memorial Hospital, Ashford Hospital, Flinders Private Hospital and North East Community Hospital — were each connected to the data centre via dedicated 1 Gbps fibre links.

This represented a 10x increase in bandwidth at each site compared to the previous 100 Mbps MPLS connections, with lower latency and more consistent performance. Clinical systems that previously felt sluggish — loading patient records, accessing imaging, running reports — became responsive.

NBN backup at every site

Each of the four fibre-connected sites was also provisioned with a backup NBN Business Internet connection, configured for automatic failover. If the primary fibre link at any site is interrupted, traffic routes over the NBN connection within seconds — keeping clinical and administrative systems accessible while the fibre fault is resolved.

The fifth site — Calvary Central Districts Hospital in Elizabeth — was connected via NBN, providing reliable access to the centralised systems in the data centre.

One provider, end to end

A key part of the value for Orthopaedics SA was consolidating everything under one provider. Caznet delivers the fibre, the NBN backup, the data centre co-location and the internet services — all managed as a single platform. There's one point of contact for faults, one provider with visibility across the entire network, and no finger-pointing between separate vendors when something needs attention.

A migration planned for minimal disruption

Caznet worked closely with Orlo One, the practice's managed service provider, to plan and execute the migration. All fibre links, NBN backup connections and data centre space were pre-provisioned and fully tested by the Caznet team well ahead of the cutover date. Routers were configured, connectivity was verified end-to-end, and the data centre rack was ready and waiting.

When the practice was ready to move, the actual migration was completed on a single Sunday — Orlo One relocated servers to the data centre and switched each site from the Vocus MPLS routers to the pre-configured Caznet routers. Because all the infrastructure groundwork had been done in advance, the cutover at each site was as simple as unplugging from the old and plugging into the new. Staff returned to work on Monday morning to a faster, more resilient network with no disruption to clinical operations.

The result

Orthopaedics SA now operates on infrastructure that matches the scale and criticality of the practice.

• No more single point of failure — All systems are in the data centre with enterprise-grade power, redundancy and monitoring. A power outage at any individual clinic no longer takes down the entire organisation.
• 10x bandwidth increase — 1 Gbps fibre at four sites, replacing 100 Mbps MPLS. Clinical systems are responsive across all locations.
• Redundant connectivity at every site — NBN backup with automatic failover ensures that no single circuit failure leaves a clinic without access to systems.
• Lower cost — The combination of fibre and NBN replaced a more expensive MPLS service while delivering significantly better performance and resilience.
• Zero disruption migration — Pre-provisioned infrastructure and a single Sunday cutover, coordinated with Orlo One, meant staff arrived Monday to a fully operational new platform.
• Simpler to manage — One provider for connectivity, hosting and internet across all five sites, with a single point of accountability.

For a practice where 23 surgeons consult across five hospitals and depend on centralised systems for every patient interaction, the infrastructure is now as reliable as the care they deliver.