Customer
Erie Shores Family Health Team (ESFHT) delivers team-based primary care to communities across Leamington, Kingsville, and Essex in southwestern Ontario. Its clinicians and staff - roughly 118 people across five-plus sites - rely every day on a shared electronic medical record (Accuro EMR) and the IT systems behind it to care for patients.
Like many growing healthcare organizations, ESFHT had reached a point where its clinical operations had outpaced the technology underneath them. As the Executive Director put it, the organization had grown while its IT had not.
Challenge
When Sentia assessed the environment, we found a foundation that was quietly carrying serious risk:
- End-of-life infrastructure. Core services ran on unsupported Windows Server versions (2008, 2012 R2, and 2019) hosted on a single Hyper-V server roughly seven years old — a single point of failure for the entire health team.
- An exposed email system. On-premises Exchange Server 2019 required inbound firewall ports to be open, widening the attack surface for an organization holding sensitive patient information.
- Backups that weren't protecting the data. The existing backup job was failing daily, and there had been no successful offsite copy of the health team's data since April 2022. A fire, hardware failure, or ransomware event could have meant permanent loss of patient and operational records.
- A reactive support model. Backup alerts were visible only to a third party, and IT was firefighting rather than planning.
On top of all this, Microsoft's end-of-support deadlines - including Windows 10 reaching end of support in October 2025 - created a hard deadline. For an organization governed by Ontario's Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), doing nothing was not an option.
Solution
Sentia delivered a staged assess → plan → migrate → modernize → manage program built on the Microsoft Cloud, designed to modernize the environment with no disruption to patient care.
Assess and plan. We used Azure Migrate and LiveOptics to inventory every server, workload, and device across all sites, then produced a detailed infrastructure design and migration schedule mapping each on-premises workload to a right-sized Azure target.
Migrate to Azure. Using Azure Site Recovery, we migrated the four core Windows Server workloads — the Active Directory domain controller, the file and print server, the Accuro scanning-and-fax server, and the Remote Desktop Services host — to Azure Virtual Machines, completing cutover in May 2025 and retiring the aging on-premises hardware.
Modernize the workplace. We moved email from Exchange Server 2019 to Exchange Online in Microsoft 365, added Microsoft Entra ID hybrid join for a single identity across all sites, and shifted Microsoft 365 Apps licensing from device-based to user-based. Inbound Exchange ports were closed.
Rebuild resilience. We established verified daily backups with an offsite copy and a replication job to the Kingsville site, so the health team can keep operating even through a catastrophic failure at its main location.
Strengthen security and compliance. We deployed multi-factor authentication and Microsoft Entra Conditional Access, and used Microsoft Purview for data loss prevention, information protection, and audit logging across SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive — building a defensible PHIPA compliance foundation.