Keeping analytics in Europe, without running the infrastructure

About Ambuce Rescue Team

Ambuce Rescue Team is one of Belgium's leading providers of urgent and non-urgent patient transport and medical assistance.

Metabase plays an important role in that operation, giving Ambuce's teams the visualisation and analytics they need to understand what is happening across the business.

Ambuce in numbers

The scale of the operation that Metabase reports on, every day, across Belgium.

The problem was not Metabase. It was everything underneath it.

Ambuce wanted to continue using Metabase. What had become increasingly difficult to justify was the operational responsibility that came with self-hosting it: server maintenance, software updates, CVE and security patches, backups, monitoring, and responding when something went wrong.

Keeping the infrastructure running was consuming an average of 12 hours a month of the team's time, engineering time that could be better spent elsewhere, and there was real downtime to show for it, notably around SSL certificate renewals.

As an NIS2 essential entity, Ambuce also needed that maintenance work carried out by a dedicated, certified resource within its audit scope, a requirement that mattered just as much as the hours saved.

The obvious managed option did not meet the requirement

Metabase offers its own managed cloud. For many organisations, that would be the natural next step.

Ambuce, however, had an important requirement: European data sovereignty. As a Belgian medical assistance provider, Ambuce wanted its analytics infrastructure and data to remain in Europe, under European data protection law, while working with a managed service provider that could meet its security and compliance requirements.

That led Ambuce to Elestio: the same open-source Metabase they had already chosen, now fully managed and hosted on Hetzner, within the EU.

What Elestio took over

Ambuce retains Metabase itself, its dashboards, questions, users and data, while Elestio takes care of keeping the underlying environment operational.

Results

Since moving to Elestio, the 12 hours a month Ambuce's team used to spend on maintenance has effectively gone to zero, and the SSL-related downtime has disappeared entirely.

Ambuce continues to run the analytics technology it chose in the first place, on infrastructure it no longer has to manage, in a location it chose, and with server maintenance, patching and backups now sitting within a certified supplier's audit scope rather than an external freelancer's.