Healthcare

Digital resilience: Control across every layer

When Bayside Health Peninsula embarked on the redevelopment of what would become Peninsula University Hospital, the stakes could not have been higher. This was the largest ever health infrastructure investment in Melbourne's south-east — a brand new 12-level clinical tower, 130 additional beds, expanded emergency, mental health, oncology, and women's services. The building was an empty shell. The network had to be built from nothing.

For Matt Walker, Bayside Health Peninsula's Manager Network and Communications, the guiding principle was unambiguous: a hospital must be always on, always secure, and always available — for patients, clinicians, and their families. Any failure in digital infrastructure is a failure in care. That made digital resilience the non-negotiable foundation of everything that followed.

Working closely with Cisco and systems integrator partner Outcomex over a two-year planning and design phase, Bayside Health Peninsula made a deliberate architectural choice: a fully software-defined fabric integrated across every domain. Cisco's Software-Defined Access (SDA) was deployed across Peninsula University Hospital, creating an intent-based, segmented network that places security and policy control at the heart of the infrastructure. Cisco Firewalls (FTD-4200 series), Identity Services Engine (ISE), Umbrella, and Stealthwatch were layered together to create an integrated Zero Trust security posture spanning both clinical and corporate systems.

The result is unified control — of devices, segmentation, security, and policy — all through a single pane of glass. For a health service supporting over 5,000 clinicians and nurses, with up to 1,500 concurrent network users at any time, that level of control is not a luxury. It is a clinical requirement.

Outcomex brought the implementation expertise to realise this vision at pace. As Matt Walker noted, having a world-class integrator delivering Cisco technology was critical — "You don't feel like you're on your own delivering such an ambitious hospital." Cisco, Outcomex, and Bayside Health Peninsula operated as a single, aligned team throughout, ensuring every architectural decision was made with patient outcomes front of mind.

A future-proofed workplace for 5,000 clinicians and nurses

A hospital is only as effective as the people working within it. For Bayside Health Peninsula, equipping over 5,000 clinicians and nursing staff with seamless, secure access to the right devices, the right networks, and the right data — wherever they were working — was as important as the physical infrastructure itself.

The challenge was significant. Staff needed to move fluidly between wards, sites, and remote locations without losing connectivity or compromising security. New satellite sites needed to be spun up quickly. Clinical and operational teams needed reliable communication tools. And patients and their families needed network access too — all under Bayside Health Peninsula's control.

Cisco's answer was a layered workplace architecture built around three core technologies. SD-WAN was deployed across all Bayside Health Peninsula sites, enabling the team to securely and rapidly provision new locations and support remote working easily and quickly. The Webex Suite — including Webex Dedicated Instance for enterprise calling and Webex Room endpoints across meeting spaces — brought clinical, administrative, and outreach teams together on a single collaboration platform. And Cisco Spaces uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to deliver real-time visibility of staff, assets and equipment, improving safety, accelerating duress response and enhancing operational efficiency across hospitals.

Outcomex played a central role in translating this architecture into a functioning clinical environment. Their deep familiarity with both the Cisco portfolio and the specific demands of healthcare delivery meant that every configuration decision was grounded in real operational context. As Outcomex noted of the partnership: "No one person can do it alone. A vision isn't enough. You need the support of all the people around you to come together with the same vision, the same goal, and the same drive."

The result is a future-proofed workplace where clinicians are connected, patients are supported, and Bayside Health Peninsula retains complete visibility and control across its entire network — from the new hospital tower to its most remote community sites.

Building an AI-ready foundation for what's next

From the earliest planning conversations, Matt Walker and the Bayside Health Peninsula leadership team understood that building a new hospital was not just about meeting today's needs — it was about being ready for what was coming. And what is coming, across every dimension of healthcare, is AI.

AI workloads place fundamentally different demands on infrastructure. They require high throughput, low latency, and genuine scalability — not just the ability to handle today's clinical data volumes, but to absorb the exponential growth that AI-driven care will generate. Legacy infrastructure, no matter how well maintained, cannot meet that bar.

The solution was Cisco FlashStack — a validated, converged infrastructure combining Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) with Pure Storage — deployed across two primary data centres. Additional smaller flashstack pods have been deployed for network management and security. The UCS-X chassis, 48 × 210c-M7 server nodes, UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnects managed through Intersight, Nexus 9K running ACI MultiPod to deliver a platform engineered for both the immediate demands of VDI, VSI, and clinical applications, and the longer-term requirements of AI workloads.

This was not a simple deployment. Bayside Health Peninsula’s existing infrastructure needed to be replaced without disrupting active clinical operations. The team co-designed the FlashStack architecture to ensure continuity and future scalability.

Cisco Professional Services completed an INFRAM assessment — benchmarking Bayside Health Peninsula's digital maturity against HIMSS frameworks and producing a clear roadmap for ongoing capability development. The entire program was structured through Cisco Enterprise Agreements and financed via Cisco Capital, giving Bayside Health Peninsula commercial predictability and the ability to stretch its public health budget further.

As Matt Walker reflected: "Our clouds, apps and data centres have to cope with both the traffic data from all our people and deal with AI workloads." With FlashStack at the core, Bayside Health Peninsula is not just ready for today — it is built for whatever the future of healthcare demands.