Carolyn’s Crown and Glory Beauty Salon: Kinetic Black Business Support Fund Grant

The Challenge
As a major corporation built by numerous acquisitions, the company was very decentralized for its size. It was an amalgam of locally-operated companies, each retaining its core identity and maintaining its name and unique attributes. Each company acquired also retained its own network infrastructure, and IT management continued making technology decisions independently. At the corporate level, they were missing out on the benefits of standardization, simplification and automation.

The Challenge
ARH has always been first to respond to the changing demands of rural healthcare. As the largest provider of care and single largest employer in southeastern Kentucky, as well as the third largest private employer in southern West Virginia, ARH has continuously invested in new technology and medical capabilities to carry out its mission of improving the health and well-being of all people within their surrounding community.
The rural nature of ARH’s hospitals and clinics had contributed to a discernible challenge of acquiring consistent connectivity and network redundancy to support their employees and patients. So, when ARH began implementing an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) application into their network, the organization knew network connections at many locations would not support new high-bandwidth demands. Because locations were single-threaded and lacked the redundancy of having a second connection, outages were not uncommon.
On top of that, ARH was lacking the visibility necessary to monitor networks proactively, resulting in reactive responses to outages and network issues. They needed a solution stat—one that encompassed monitoring and maintenance from a Network Operating Center (NOC) to ensure all locations were always up and running. ARH knew they wanted a solution that would integrate all of their facilities into a single network to streamline infrastructure management moving forward.