NHS Foundation Trust

Cloud-First Scalable Solution on Azure

About the customer

NHS Foundation Trust Drives Cloud-First Scalable Solution on Azure

A leading NHS Foundation Trust in the South of England, a longstanding customer of Telefónica Tech, embarked on a crucial transition from on-premises infrastructure to a more scalable and resilient solution in Azure. Collaborating with an experienced Azure partner, such as Telefónica Tech, helped this trust migrate vital clinical systems to ensure smooth hospital operations while advancing its digital transformation journey.

The Challenge

Ensuring Critical Service Availability During Migration

With over 9000+ employees across different sites, this leading NHS hospital trust provides healthcare services for nearly a million people in the South of England. Their goal is to deliver exceptional healthcare services to the communities they serve. In alignment with their broader cloud-first strategy, the urgency of some of their operating systems nearing end-of-life heightened the need for a seamless transition to a more scalable infrastructure.

Navigating this delicate balance within a busy hospital environment needed a trusted healthcare IT partner and an Azure expert to ensure the continuity of critical clinical services while migrating legacy systems to Azure.

The Solution

Smooth Migration Of Over 70 Servers

To kick off the project we meticulously assessed on-premises virtual and physical servers for migration to Azure, ensuring optimal workload placement and identifying systems or applications requiring refactoring for successful Azure integration. Close collaboration with the trust’s IT team facilitated the identification of critical applications like Clinical Data and SQL Server Instances within the hospital IT estate.

Navigating the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) and various third-party networks, we secured vital ports for uninterrupted connectivity, ensuring a seamless migration process. Leveraging Azure Express Route expedited connectivity between existing on-premises data centres and the public cloud.

Leveraging Azure Advisor’s security features, we provided detailed security and compliance reports, ensuring adherence to NHS England requirements. Our agile approach enabled us to adapt to the fast pace of change within the NHS, fostering a collaborative partnership for a smooth Azure transition.

Solution Overview

Delivering a Scalable Azure Migration Framework

Migration of SQL and Windows servers to Azure.
Integration of Azure services such as Azure Migrate and Azure Advisor
Successful migration of 70 servers, with a further 120 planned
Impacting 9,000+ staff across 3 hospital sites

The Outcomes

Stability, Security, Resilience

The trust now hosts critical hospital systems in Azure, including patient heart monitor records, printer management systems, archival storage, and wireless certificate authority. Azure load balancers ensure seamless operation, mitigating any single points of failure.

Streamlining daily IT management tasks enables the hospital’s IT team to prioritise valuable initiatives, boosting overall efficiency and innovation.

Beyond operational efficiency, the trust has achieved significant benefits including:

Reduced

power consumption compared to previous on-premises infrastructure

Increased

resilience and data protection

Improved

stability, security, resilience, and scalability.

The Future

Building on a Cloud‑First Foundation

Looking to the future, the trust’s IT team and Telefónica Tech have created a successful blueprint for migrating the remaining 120 servers in planned stages.

Aligning with the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework, future initiatives will include implementing a single pane of glass for visibility across virtual machines and cloud resources.

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