File Services Solution Architecture for a State-wide Health Provider

Overview

A Queensland-wide health services provider was facing an infrastructure challenge of considerable scale. Its file management platform — the system through which 75,000 clinical and non-clinical staff created, stored, and accessed unstructured file-based information every day — had reached end of life. The legacy solution, which had been reliably operating for approximately twenty years, was no longer supported and could not meet the organisation's evolved requirements for mobility, automation, and self-service access.

The numbers alone illustrated the complexity: over 200 million files consuming more than 160 terabytes of storage, distributed across 172 facilities state-wide. File access constituted 99% of all file-related service requests, yet the platform underpinning it held a largely invisible status within the broader ICT portfolio. The organisation engaged Knowble to define the solution architecture necessary to migrate to a contemporary file management platform — one that would not only replace the legacy system but position the organisation for modern information management practices.

The Challenge

The engagement presented a set of challenges that extended well beyond a straightforward platform replacement:

• Geographic distribution — the organisation operated across the entire state, from metropolitan data centres to remote community health facilities, with highly variable network bandwidth and latency. The solution needed to perform consistently across all locations without requiring network upgrades that were outside the project scope
• Organisational complexity — services were delivered through multiple regional health services, each with their own operational requirements, IT staffing, and budget constraints. The solution needed to support multi-tenanted configuration with regional autonomy while maintaining central policy control
• Integration ecosystem — file services did not exist in isolation. The solution needed to integrate with identity management, enterprise monitoring, remote access, print services, backup and archive systems, and existing information management platforms including electronic document management and collaboration tools
• Unclassified information — a significant proportion of the 200 million files were unclassified, with no identifiable ownership. This created uncertainty about migration planning, retention requirements, and storage optimisation — and meant that a purely automated migration approach would carry substantial risk
• Clinical sensitivity — the files supported the coordination and delivery of clinical and non-clinical health services. Any disruption to file access had direct implications for patient care, making availability and performance non-negotiable requirements

Our Approach

This engagement is a direct example of Knowble's Architecture Excellence service — delivering a solution architecture that addressed both the immediate platform replacement and the longer-term positioning of file services within the organisation's information management ecosystem.

Knowble's approach was structured around several key activities:

• Current state analysis — detailed analysis of the existing file services environment, including storage utilisation patterns across all facilities, file type distribution, service request volumes, network latency profiles, and device and operating system dependencies. This data-driven assessment provided the evidence base for architecture decisions rather than relying on assumptions
• Architecture principles — seven architecture principles were defined to guide design decisions and solution evaluation: Customer First, Adaptable Systems, Prioritise for Performance, Design for As-A-Service, Control Consumption, Integrated Eco-system, and Optimised Service Cost
• Risk and constraint analysis — formal identification of architectural risks, constraints, and assumptions, including the risk of preconceived solution bias in requirements, the challenge of limited market scan information, and the constraint that unclassified file data would impact migration planning
• Vendor engagement — a structured market scan and limited vendor engagement across multiple technology providers to evaluate contemporary file services platforms against the organisation's requirements and architecture principles
• Multi-viewpoint architecture — the solution architecture was expressed through thirteen formal views: context, business service, capability, systems, standards, information, security, integration, network, deployment, backup and recovery, management and monitoring, and market scan

Solution

The architecture centred on a three-layer hierarchical deployment pattern — Service Core, Service Aggregation, and Service Edge — designed to align with the organisation's existing network topology and support staged transformation across regional health services:

• Service Core — centralised high-availability clusters deployed across enterprise data centres, responsible for policy administration, long-term retention, multi-tenant reporting, and cloud storage tiering to providers such as AWS and Azure. The core provided enterprise-wide configuration control while optimising centralised storage and data protection investment
• Service Aggregation — regional deployments at major hospital sites, configurable to match each regional health service's requirements for user count, site connectivity, and service independence. Aggregation points maintained local control over information management policy while synchronising with the Service Core for centralised retention and administration
• Service Edge — deployments at medium and small facilities, ranging from local file caching appliances to direct over-the-wire access depending on site size and network connectivity. Edge deployments ensured performance consistency at remote locations while being managed from their regional aggregation point

The architecture also defined a comprehensive capability model spanning service access, service management, service security, data management, interface management, and service distribution — with clear delineation of which capabilities were to be delivered by the file services solution itself and which would be realised through integration with existing enterprise platforms.

A future state service architecture addressed the operational model, including service level agreements, support organisation design, service costing for consumption-based chargeback, and a detailed service transition plan that acknowledged the need for co-existence of legacy and contemporary platforms during migration.

Outcomes

The solution architecture delivered a clear, evidence-based foundation for the organisation's file services transformation:

• Scalable deployment model — the three-tier hierarchical pattern provided a deployment approach that could be rolled out incrementally across regional health services, with each tier independently configurable to match local requirements while maintaining enterprise governance
• Vendor-neutral evaluation — the structured market scan and vendor engagement, assessed against defined architecture principles and thirty-five technical requirements, gave the organisation a defensible basis for procurement decisions
• Ecosystem integration — by explicitly mapping file services within the broader service delivery context — including existing investments in collaboration, document management, and clinical systems — the architecture ensured the new platform would complement rather than duplicate existing capabilities
• Risk-informed migration — the architecture addressed the practical reality of migrating 200 million files of uncertain classification by incorporating co-existence planning, bulk migration tooling requirements, and staged transition across facilities
• Service sustainability — the service architecture component — covering SLAs, support models, consumption-based costing, and chargeback mechanisms — ensured the solution was designed not just for implementation but for ongoing operational sustainability across the distributed health network