A new optimal and secure Cloud infrastructure to reinforce administrative and operational services A case of the National Social Security Fund

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1 Good Practices in Social Security Good practice in operation since: 2012 A new optimal and secure Cloud infrastructure to reinforce administrative and operational services A case of the National Social Security Fund National Social Security Fund Lebanon Published

2 1 Summary The National Social Security Fund (Caisse nationale de sécurité sociale (CNSS)) is considered to be the largest institution in Lebanon in terms of providing social services since it manages more than 1.3 million insured individuals across 37 local and regional offices throughout Lebanon. The modular nature of the new Cloud infrastructure has enabled us to achieve exactly what we required rather than speculating with a cumbersome Information technology (IT) solution about a hypothetical increase in our activities across Lebanon. The private Cloud was implemented by specialists with anticipated expenditure at all levels: the time and extent of investments required in IT, hardware and software, can generally be met in several hours to meet operational requirements. In summary, service quality and added value are the strong points of the private Cloud - far more so that the hourly costs. It was a question of delivering agility and scalability but also of increasing security, performance, resilience and reliability. CRITERIA 1 What was the issue/problem/challenge addressed by your good practice? Since the technical infrastructure and IT applications were put in place in 2007 and 2008 as part of the first phase of the IT system master plan at CNSS we had been confronted with a variety of problems linked on the one hand to an increase in the number of operational transactions and the switch-over from the manual system to the computerized system (in October 2012 we reached 3 million IT operations, two million of which were for the health and maternity insurance schemes alone and handled by more than 600 users), and on the other hand the high operating costs of the national IT park which comprised 60 servers, half of which were at the headquarters, and more than 800 personal computers. By applying this practice we reduced the number of servers at head office to 10 from 34 with the virtualization of personal computers at head office (replacement by "ThinClient" technology) and in the branch offices. In fact the first completely virtual branch was inaugurated in December This new good practice has enabled us to reduce considerably the costs for the data centre and the infrastructure, electricity for operations and air-conditioning, rent and interest, premises maintenance, infrastructure support, server bays, storage, backups and archiving, network equipment, monitoring, business continuity solutions, security (including encryption) and firewalls.

3 2 CRITERIA 2 What were the main objectives and the expected outcomes? The main objectives were: Ensure business continuity by reducing disaster recovery time. Optimal use of IT resources. Guarantee the confidentiality, integrity and availability of IT data. Ensure that effective, far-reaching and complex control measures could be implemented on request. Make hardware application execution independent. Reduce energy costs (mains and electricity generators). Reduce staff costs. The results achieved were: Considerable reduction in the costs for energy, space and maintenance. The new infrastructure now enables uninterrupted service to be provided. Deployment of new application servers or personal computers is rapid. Increased return on investment.

4 3 CRITERIA 3 What is the innovative approach/strategy followed to achieve the objectives? The CNSS opted to implement this new private Cloud technology while ensuring that operational and administrative services were not interrupted. In effect, the switch-over to this new architecture was done in several phases, the first being to reduce the number of servers at head office from 34 to 10 by re-allocating servers to offices that did not have a local server, applications and databases were redeployed taking account of load balancing, and finally by replacing computers by thin clients. The new approach was part of an overall project for all existing CNSS resources, and in effect implementation began in 2012 at head office and in one other office to be extended to all CNSS offices by the end of CRITERIA 4 Have the resources and inputs been used in an optimal way to achieve the set objectives and the expected outcomes? Please specify what internal or external evaluations of the practice have taken place and what impact/results have been identified/achieved so far. CNSS brought in specialists in implementing new technologies involving Cloud Computing and virtualization. This made it possible to make optimal use of resources and budgets to reach the objectives defined by CNSS. Internal studies were carried out at head office (modification of the data centre infrastructure, virtualization of servers and applications and federated networks) and at one office (virtualization of personal computers). By applying this new practice correctly CNSS was able to achieve well-defined results; both in terms of user satisfaction in operating the new architecture since they reported a clear improvement in effective performance, and as regards the reduction in operating costs. CRITERIA 5 What lessons have been learned? To what extent would your good practice be appropriate for replication by other social security institutions? Normally data centres had been used on the basis of "one server, one task", which often meant that the server was massively under-used, operating at approximately 15 to 20 per cent of its capacity. Cloud Computing and virtualization technology enable multiple applications to run

5 4 on the same server, radically improving the level use and may result in a significant reduction in the number of servers an enterprise needs. This new practice is not only efficient and secure (using a private and non-public Cloud), it reduces costs, bay space, electricity and is a greener technology. The success of CNSS' private Cloud project for what is considered one of the largest institutions in Lebanon could be taken as an example by other social security institutions in the world.